By ANTHONY VANDENBERG
By early November, the wind had settled down, but my obsession had not.
Somewhere beneath Lake Norman – 40 to 50’ meters deep – my foil kit lay buried in muddy darkness. I had already hired a diver the day after the incident. He surfaced cold, shaken and empty-handed, reporting what I didn’t want to accept: the water was so silty that visibility dropped to nearly zero down on the bottom.
Still, the CLT Windsurfing Junkies don’t quit easily.
Search attempts turned into weekend missions. I upgraded my GPS strategy, trading handheld guesswork for precise satellite mapping. Then came the engineering figuring out effective tools and better strategies to comb the bottom of Lake Norman.
I built a trawl net out of a volleyball net. No luck. I built a bigger net – twice the size – with a heavy chain as weight and crafted “otter boards” designed to keep the mouth open like a real commercial trawler. Still no luck, I tried more diving, this time on my own. Still nothing. Perhaps I have been searching in the wrong place; what if the foil didn’t just sink straight down? What if it flipped over and flew through the water column – gliding down in an unpredictable speed and direction?
I tried with a fish camera and display screen, modifying it in so many ways that the original manufacturer wouldn’t recognize it. I fashioned a sun blinder for the display that may look like an NFL referee place review. I launched before sunrise so many days, spending hours and hours dragging the camera along the lake bottom – hunched over a screen, fighting glare, fighting wind, fighting exhaustion. I made friends with catfish and bass. I hallucinated shapes. I questioned my sanity.
Then, I did what any reasonable person would do after failing repeatedly.
I modified my search strategy and went off in a whimsical direction from my original GPS track. By early December, I could feel my search gear and new strategies may just work.
On December 3rd, I paddled out just after texting my Junkies group chat, “Should be out on the water in minutes, this time I explicitly and deceptively explained to FATE that I was not going to be actually searching for the foil. I was just going to be testing out my new search equipment.”
Three hours into the session, I was letting the wind push me farther and farther away from my original track, when I saw something on the screen that made my heart and head EXPLODE: white lettering. Clear as day: “AEON.”
There it was – my foil – resting on its side like a lost treasure. I marked it as fast as I could, dropping fluorescent buoys, recording multiple GPS points and paddling back to shore with frozen hands as the sun sank under the horizon.
The next morning, getting all my dive equipment ready, I explained to Donald that I would not get excited; if I locate it, I would first tie a search line to it and then drag it up from the surface safely. That is not what happened! Forty-four feet down on the bottom, visibility was zero, and in an instant I lost all hope. I set out on a slow crawl across the mushy bottom trying my best not to stir up any more silt. Here and there, mysterious little ghost windows the size of softballs would randomly open up in the silt fog blanket. I peaked through one of these “ghost windows” and saw something like a blackish shadow; it was unnaturally completely straight – man made!
Without thinking, my right hand, dragging my arm behind it, and almost dislocating my shoulder, shot through the window and encircled my fingers with a vice grip around the foil’s titanium fuselage. With my left hand, I crushed my BC inflator button and shot back up to the surface with not a care for a safety stop. As I rocketed up off the miserable bottom, I lifted the foil way over my head so that it would pop out the surface just like the Crucifix of a Greek Diver on the Epiphany!
I popped out the surface of the lake in perfect triumph and absolute happiness! It was really a tremendous feeling of joy…very hard to explain. Donald looked just as happy. Just before handing him our treasure, I asked Donald if he got the video shot of me surfacing, and he said he wasn’t sure. So, I suggested I go back down about 16’ and we repeat, and this time he gets the glorious victory breaking the surface video for posterity.
We were both in the best spirits yelling and screaming and just enjoying the find like it was Blackbeard’s treasure. We went to a nearby bar to toast and celebrate SUCCESS. I said, “Hey, Donald, let’s do this, let’s promise each other that we will never tell anyone about the fact that we didn’t get the original video and we keep it our secret forever about the staged second video and never let anyone know,” and Donald agreed and we laughed like we ruled the world.
A few beers later, I said “Hey Donald, show me both the videos.” As he searched his phone, his countenance became more and more perplexed and agitated, and he finally looked up at me with the saddest face you’d ever seen. He said, “I swear, I swear I don’t know what happened, but both videos are GONE!”
A few hours later, as I drove through the crowded evening rush traffic, I thought: “Wow, you know what? When Don told me he lost the videos, I was bummed, but the more I think about it, this makes the WHOLE STORY an even BETTER STORY!”
