A woman and her purse were reunited after eight months apart thanks to an Abbotsford scuba diver who found it beneath the White Rock pier.
It’s not the first time Mike Bertness has pulled up treasure from the deep. He estimates he’s found five or six other purses and wallets — not to mention a pair of Gucci sunglasses — since he began diving eight years ago.
“I always seem to find interesting stuff,” he said Thursday. “It’s remarkable what gets lost.”
Bertness was scanning the ocean floor for Dungeness crab last Sunday afternoon when the brown leather purse caught his eye. Back on the pier, he opened it to find several one hundred-dollar bills and prepaid credit cards, as well as identification cards.
Using Facebook, he contacted the purse’s owner, who told him she’d lost it last summer. Bertness did not ask for details, thinking she might be embarrassed. The Victoria woman is arranging to have her mother pick up the purse this weekend.
When Bertness first began finding lost wallets, he would drop them off at the police station, “but it’s so much more fun when you get to talk to people yourself,” he said.
He once found a wallet covered in sediment while diving in Okanagan Lake.
“It was just a little lump, but as I went by, I poked it and realized it wasn’t a rock.”
The wallet belonged to a Vancouver man who had lost it 10 years prior. The cards had delaminated and a picture inside had almost disintegrated.
Bertness spread out the contents, took a picture and contacted the owner. “He said seeing that wallet brought back a lot of memories.” The picture was of an old girlfriend.
Bertness said he tries to return everything he finds, unless there is no identification.
While snorkelling in Maui this winter, the diver and his daughter found a pair of Gucci sunglasses. With no owner in sight, his daughter hopes to sell them online for a few hundred dollars.
Bertness’s ocean discoveries have also netted his family some new friends.
Last summer, he helped a boater stranded near the White Rock pier after his anchor line became tangled in his boat’s propeller. Bertness and a friend helped to cut him free. The man was so grateful he took his family out on a sailboat a few weeks later.
Bertness said he usually dives in White Rock, Deep Cove or on the North Shore. He wears a full dry suit and enjoys viewing the sea life. The Dungeness crabs he sometimes brings home make a wonderful supper, and the wallets make a good story.
