In a remarkable story of endurance and coincidence, a camera lost in a shipwreck off the west coast of Vancouver Island two years ago is about to be reunited with its owner, with its memory card and cherished photographs intact.
The camera belongs to Vancouver artist Paul Burgoyne, who suffered a tragic loss in 2012 when his boat, the Bootlegger, was shipwrecked while traveling 500 kilometers from Vancouver to his summer home in Tahsis, British Columbia.
The camera, along with valuable photographs, sank with the ship, leaving Burgoyne stunned.
“That just sh0cked me,” Burgoyne said. “Getting the camera or the photos back, that’s really quite wonderful.”
Fast forward two years to May, when Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre university students Tella Osler and Beau Doherty, accompanied by BMSC Diving and Safety Officer Siobhan Gray, discovered an unexpected find while doing research dives off Aguilar Point, British Columbia. They discovered Burgoyne’s camera 12 meters below the surface.
Professor Isabelle M. Côté, a Marine Ecology expert at Simon Fraser University, stated that the camera had a variety of marine creatures when discovered, demonstrating the endurance of life even in unexpected settings.
The Lexar Platinum II, 8 GB memory card miraculously still operational, allowed Côté to post online a family portrait found among the photos, hoping to locate the owner.
Fortune smiled on the recovery operation when a member of the Bamfield coast guard station recognized Burgoyne in the photo, having previously saved him after the shipwreck. A heartwarming reunion between Burgoyne and his long-lost photos is on the way.
“I have a new respect for, you know, these electronics,” Burgoyne said. “You discard most of it away every two years, but that little card is an amazing bit of technology.”
Burgoyne was flooded with recollections of the shipwreck as he learned of the camera’s retrieval.
He reflected on the peaceful moment sitting in the back of the boat, the erroneous autopilot assumption, and the abrupt turmoil that ensued.
Burgoyne’s nine-meter trawler met its fate less than an hour after grabbing the last photos, with the camera lost at sea, taking with it invaluable images. Among these were snapshots of a family collecting to handful his parents’ ashes at Lake of the Woods in Ontario and a video depicting the turbulent seas his boat suffered before the wreck.
This amazing recovery not only features the durability of technology but also the unpredicted twists of fate, turning what seemed lost into a fulfilling reunion of memories from the depths of the ocean.
