Two years after his trawler, the Bootlegger, went down off Vancouver Island, artist Paul Burgoyne is preparing to reclaim a piece of his past—thanks to a remarkable underwater discovery. In May, researchers from Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, including students Tella Osler and Beau Doherty and Dive Safety Officer Siobhan Gray, unearthed Burgoyne’s underwater camera twelve meters beneath the waves at Aguilar Point. The device, once lost in the 2012 wreck, was encrusted with barnacles and home to small marine life, yet its 8 GB Lexar Platinum II memory card survived unscathed.
When Marine Ecology expert Professor Isabelle M. Côté examined the recovered files, she found them perfectly intact and immediately shared a family portrait online to help track down the owner. Soon after, a member of the Bamfield Coast Guard—who had rescued Burgoyne from the wreck—recognized the image and alerted him to the find.
Burgoyne, who lost not only his boat but also irreplaceable photos of family moments and a video of the stormy seas that capsized his vessel, was astonished by the camera’s resilience. “It’s incredible that, after two years at the bottom of the ocean, this little memory card still worked,” he said. He looks forward to viewing again the snapshots of his parents’ ashes being scattered at Lake of the Woods and those final, haunting clips of the Bootlegger’s last voyage.
This extraordinary recovery underscores both the surprising durability of modern electronics and the serendipitous twists that can reunite us with what we thought was lost forever—a testament to the persistence of memory, even beneath the sea.