A highly experienced British-born scuba diver who went missing in Ontario, Canada while working to retrieve a submerged road vehicle on 18 March was found dead by divers the following morning.
The body of Gary Smith, 67, was recovered following a search that involved local police and fire department crews as well as the Ontario Provincial Police underwater search & recovery unit.
Smith, who lived in the nearby town of Chatham, had failed to resurface as expected at around 11.30am. He was reported to have been working at Erieau Marina near the shores of Lake Erie to connect cables to a vehicle that had entered the boat channel last November. Its occupants had escaped, but icing-over of the channel had delayed recovery of the vehicle.
Because of conditions in the channel, specialised equipment and resources had been required to assist in the search, stated Chatham-Kent Police Service.
According to a 2013 report in the Chatham Voice, Smith had been born in Manchester in England, started diving in 1986 and had worked in the diving industry since 1993.
He had previously run a dive-shop and club called Red Devil Scuba in Chatham, where he was said to have raised more than Can $90,000 (more than £67,000) for multiple charities through dive-a-thons in the space of seven years.
Smith had received an award from the Ontario Underwater Council for staging one such 24-hour event, an idea said to have later been copied across Canada.
He had described south-western Ontario as a diver’s paradise because of Lake Erie’s many shipwrecks, and said that Red Devil Scuba had been first to discover the steamer City of London there.
On the same day
Also on 18 March, in the USA, a 43-year-old man reported to be an Indian national died at Molasses Reef off Key Largo in Florida.
Monroe County Sheriff’s Office reported that Abhinav Lamba had been diving there at around 11am. It was unclear whether this meant that he was scuba-diving, freediving or snorkelling but the office said that he had appeared to be in distress before going ‘subsurface’.
Staff from a commercial dive-boat had recovered Lamba from a depth of 7-8m, brought him back to their boat and began delivering CPR. He was taken to Mariners Hospital in Tavernier, where he was pronounced dead. A post mortem examination was to be carried out.
Five days earlier, 71-year-old Lonnie Lee Higgins from Missouri had been declared dead at the same hospital after getting into difficulties while diving the Eagle shipwreck off Islamorada.
