A diver finds excitement, mystery, and a gun at the bottom of a lake

Clayton Helkenberg has been diving a lot lately. Everyone’s pandemic is a little different, and Helkenberg’s has led him to the bottom of the Fraser Valley’s lakes. On Monday, he was beneath the waves at Chilliwack Lake when he spotted what looked to be a plastic bag in the sand below. Then... well, we’ll let the Chilliwack resident explain what happened next, and how diving reminds him of his pre-pandemic workplace: the casino. You can also watch the video of his discovery on YouTube. Helkenberg talked to us Tuesday, less than 24 hours after later:

"So I grabbed what was in the bag. And I could feel some sort of metal object. What poked out first was actually the case of bullets—a little box. The way the bullets look—the ends of them—it actually kind of looks like an LED light with little light bulbs. I was like ‘What the heck?’ and then I could feel the metal thing."

"I didn’t know what it was, so I had my wife start recording, and as soon as she started recording, I could kind of feel… it was like ‘This feels like a gun.’ And then I realized they were bullets right away. So once I got to that, I was pretty excited."

"There are guys who do metal-detecting and I tried it out, but it's just honestly a bit boring for me. You're going to find coins and stuff. But the stuff you find in lakes, it's forever surprising. And a lot of it is very accidental stuff. So you just really never know. In this case, I guess it might have been purposeful, I'm assuming. It was off the edge of this little rock outcropping and kind of throwing distance away from it. So if it was thrown by the other 20 feet farther, it would have been really deep."

FVC: What is it about finding a gun that is particularly exciting?

"It is just kind of the mystery. Guns don’t usually end up in lakes for positive purposes. With phones [found in the lake] it just kind of happens all the time. It’s still kind of fun to find a phone or a GoPro, but with a gun and jewelry and rings, it’s a mystery of why it’s there. It’s more of an exciting story that I can imagine about why it was in the lake."

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Helkenberg took the gun to the RCMP detachment, where an officer seemed surprised that the discovery was, indeed, an actual handgun.

The 26-year-old Chilliwack resident began diving multiple times a week about a year ago, after he was laid off from his job at the casino because of the pandemic. Like many over the last year, Helkenberg has been working temporary jobs while trying to find more permanent work. That has given him the opportunity to dive more, and to find more people’s lost stuff. He was recently in the news after finding a still-working phone on the bottom of Harrison Lake and delivering it to its owner.

"I'm just having a lot of fun," Helkenberg says. "It’s kind of the only socially acceptable time to kind of be on EI without people saying, hey, go get a job."

Locally, he says Lindeman has some of the best water, while Cultus Lake is where you go if you want to find stuff. The problem there, he said, is the sheer amount of trash in the water. And he says there are aspects about searching for underwater items that can resemble going to a casino.

"It’s one of the things I’ve joked about, because I worked at a casino for years: [Diving] is probably the most healthy and cost-efficient way to gamble. Worst case scenario, you went for a nice swim. Best case scenario, you find some valuable stuff and it’s fun."