After shipwrecking on his way to Tahsis, B.C., Paul Burgoyne lost many things he never thought he’d see again. Thanks to two students who found a camera while diving near Bamfield, Burgoyne was about to have something he never thought he’d see in a million years returned to him.
The camera was found 40 feet underwater while the students were searching for starfish for a research project. They had no idea how long the camera had been down there, just that it was incredibly rusty and beat up.
“One of them picked it up and put it in his pocket and kept counting the starfish,” a professor looking over the dive told ABC.
‘When they came up from the dive, he said, “Look what I found.”‘
When they inspected the camera they discovered a memory card. Wondering if any pictures survived, Professor Siobhan Gray cleaned off the card and put it in the computer. It turns out it worked.
The research team managed to track down the owner after putting up posters in the area. Though they knew it was a long shot, a Coast Guard member recognized a man in the picture of a happy group. It was Paul Burgoyne.
“That just shocked me,” said Burgoyne. “Getting the camera, or the photos back, that’s really quite wonderful.”
Some of the pictures he had on the camera were of the scattering of his parents ashes with his family at Lake of the Woods in Ontario.
“I have a new respect for, you know, these electronics,” Burgoyne said. “You throw most of it away every two years, but that little card is an amazing bit of technology.”
