August 24, 2025

Watch Recovered from Whitewater Lake, WI

When Mitch texted me on a Saturday with the hopes of recovering his Google Pixel 3 from the muddy depths of Whitewater Lake, I was leaving to dive Geneva Lake to help find a lost ring (see Bigfoot Beach Rescue).  Getting to Whitewater, WI before nightfall was not going to happen.  

How about Sunday?  He was leaving the cabin on Whitewater Lake for the Chicago area Sunday afternoon ahead of the workweek.  Would there be a time on Sunday morning then?  My standing Sunday morning commitments precluded me from a morning search.  That left a small window early Sunday afternoon.  Not ideal, but worth a try.       

I arrived a little after 1:00 pm, donned my wetsuit and diving equipment, and talked with Mitch about how he lost it.  

The day before, he was cooling off about 10-15 feet from the shoreline when his watch slipped off.  He attempted to retrieve it himself, but like many of the dam-created lakes in Wisconsin, the water is murky and the bottom soft and muddy.  These types of lakes make recovering lost items especially difficult due to low visibility and the tendency for items to submerge into the mud.

My experience diving this kind of lake was confirmed.  Zero visibility, soft, deep mud underfoot.  I swam out to the approximate area and turned to look at Mitch on the dock.  He gave me a thumbs up confirming the starting point was a good one.

I attempted to follow a grid search pattern, but found it very difficult to do with no visibility.  After I searched what I thought was a straight line, I surfaced to check my position only to find I was off.  As a backpacker, I’ve heard of the “circling effect” of hikers attempting to navigate without a compass.  “Without a compass, a lost person tends to walk in circles due to a lack of external reference points and the accumulation of small, random errors in the brain’s navigation system. This behavior has been scientifically verified through experiments where people in dense forests and deserts were tracked via GPS.” says Google’s Gemini AI, citing www.sciencedaily.com.  

 

 Apparently the same can happen with divers in low visibility water.  For over an hour, I swam a line, surfaced, reoriented, dove, swam a line, and repeated this over and over with no success.  I was wearing myself out and losing hope along the way.

I returned to shore to rest, catch my breath, and ask a few more questions.  I showed Mitch the few trash items I did recover.  Thankfully, Mitch offered to get in the lake with me, and swim to the location where he best remembered losing the watch.  Taking a metal leaf rake with him, he swam out and jammed the rake deep into the mud so he would have something to stabilize his position.  

In the end, this was the best idea of the day.  Once he was positioned, I swam out to him and began to search.  Sweeping with my metal detector, it seemed only moments later that I heard the sound I was looking for.  It wasn’t long before my hand grasped what I knew was his watch.  I surfaced, holding the watch up, and grunted out something through my regulator to get his attention.  When I was close to him, I saw his hands underwater and placed the watch into his, and then let go.  We both swam to shore.

Needless to say, we were both relieved and glad to be out of the water.  And yes, the watch still worked.  If it wasn’t for Mitch being willing to get back in the lake (and it was a bit chilly) and orienting himself by memory, I don’t think we would have had success.

Returning lost items to people never gets old.  It’s great to have a hobby that brings joy to myself and others.