Is that what it looks like?

While doing a search this summer, we found a couple of promising targets to investigate. The process of searching with sidescan sonar technology is sometimes tedious and time consuming. If done properly, however, it’s usually the most efficient way to find a drowning victim in a relatively large area. In this situation, we found two items that merited investigation.

We recovered our victim, the first target we checked, but what about this “other” victim? Our tools measured it between 5 and 6 feet long. It looks awfully similar to the targets we see when we know our work has paid off. But we recovered our guy. So what was this?

For better or worse, we have a few people on our team that don’t sleep well until the job is done. Really done. And it sure seemed possible that there could be one more victim at the bottom of this lake. If so, that’s somebody’s son. A brother, a daughter - and it feels like a gnawing responsibility to go check. What, or who, is that?

So we spent a day on the lake this weekend, checking. Just to be sure. Since we record our search tracks using GPS and mapping technology, we were able to go to precisely the same location, and run scans from multiple directions to get a better sense for what we were seeing.

What did we find? We’re pretty confident now, that this was just a weirdly placed pile of rocks. There are plenty of things at the bottom like this, and it’s hard to tell, sometimes, from a single angle. More passes and more angles paints a better picture. We could have just left it, I suppose. But we had to be sure. That’s how we roll.