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Lakes Area Dive Team
The members of the Lakes Area Dive Team are all volunteers. They work with the local sheriff’s departments and Cass County Environmental Services.
Contributed photos
Quiet group of volunteers protects our area lakes
Area divers help families find closure, remove trash, help in fight against AIS
By Travis Grimler
One of the biggest attractions throughout Minnesota is its lakes.
The state’s reputation and entire communities are built around the many bodies of water throughout the lakes area, and while many claim familiarity with the surface of these lakes when it comes to fishing and boating, few can claim such familiarity with their depths.
However, one group of volunteers has made it their business to get up close and personal with places most lake lovers only
Jackie Frana
ever touch with fishing lures. They are the Lakes Area Dive Team.
The dive team is perhaps best known for their vital services in rescue and recovery efforts, alongside local law enforcement, fire departments and first responders.
The 18-member dive team has been serving in that capacity since its founding in 2002. Many of the group’s members joined because of specific lake tragedies. Some went so far as to become trained and certified in scuba diving specifically so they could qualify to join.
“We had a drowning in Cass County and my wife was with the ambulance at the time,” said Corry Hill, team president. “She and another ambulance member happened to be in on the call. They said we should form a dive team and that would help. She said, ‘We were talking about doing this, would you be interested?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ I was on the fire department at the time. So then we formed a dive team and that’s how I got into diving.”
This nonprofit, volunteer organization helps to search for and recover people and things that have gone to the bottom of the lake within a 6,400 square mile range, including Hubbard, Beltrami and Cass counties.
Catching criminals
Sometimes their work includes finding criminal evidence.
“We have been instrumental with law enforcement in a couple counties with finding significant evidence for prosecution of criminal activity,” said Jackie Frana, dive team treasurer.
Smaller items are harder to find, but sometimes with a little luck and persistence, they can come through.
“Two or three years ago there was a double homicide that has recently been sentenced,” Frana said. “We found the handgun that was used in that. We did three different searches and the Cass Lake team came down to search with their remote operated vehicle, but they didn’t find it. We got a little more information and went out in the winter, cut a hole in the ice and our divers dropped almost exactly on top of it. It was amazing.”
Sometimes their dives include removing vehicles that have gone through the ice at the direction of the sheriff’s department or Department of Natural Resources.
They train at least once a month, often twice or more, like most fire departments, and the members work to keep their diving skills sharp. Though the team itself doesn’t recover lost personal items like rings, some of its members do so in their free time to hone their skills.
“I’d put us up against any professional team in the state of Minnesota,” Frana said.
The dive team does most of its work without fanfare. The most attention they usually receive is the occasional mention in a newspaper article or when they provide their services for extra safety during local Polar Plunge events.
Searching for AIS
One service they provide with little or no credit is aquatic invasive species searches. For the past three or four years the organization has been working with Cass County Environmental Services to monitor lakes that are identified to have likely infestations or to be in high risk of infestation.
“They serve two functions for us,” said Dana Gutzmann, Cass County Environmental Services AIS lake technician.
The Lakes Area Dive Team has full face masks that allow them to communicate via radio with one another.
Over 30 Years of Experience
Joe Carlson
“They help with our kind of rapid response when we get a report of new, potential AIS in a lake, but they also do a lot of monitoring work for potential AIS. For that the Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center has a tool where we can see the high priority lakes in Cass County that have a higher need of monitoring.”
Hill and his son were responsible for confirming the presence of zebra mussels in Leech Lake.
“We found the first adult zebra mussels I think three years ago now,” Hill said. “We were just doing a fun dive, testing some new equipment we had. We were out from the beach area in I think about 20 feet of water. We came to the surface to talk, then we dropped back down and landed right on top of them. There were two sitting right there at that spot, and those were the only ones we found in the area.”
Though Hill and his son were not actually diving on behalf of the dive team that day, their training in searching for AIS came in handy. More often, team members have access to the list provided by environmental services.
Joe Carlson performs many of the club’s AIS dives throughout the year, starting while the water is still very cold and continuing on late in the season.
“Sometimes it’s driven by people that live on the lake,” said Carlson, a certified public safety diver. “They think they’ve seen an invasive species. For example, in Woman Lake. I dove there last year and there was someone who thought they saw one zebra mussel. I dove around a resort. I dove around a creek. I dove around a boat landing. Boat landings are typically the places boats come in and out from out of the area and it’s the most likely area you’re going to find an infestation.”
In 2021, Carlson checked Wabedo, Ten Mile, Lawrence, Roosevelt, Woman, Hand, Ada, Birch and Pleasant lakes. He hasn’t personally found any confirmed new AIS samples; however, in September 2021, he stumbled across a long forgotten class ring in Ada Lake near Backus.
A Pequot Lakes High School graduate had lost the ring only weeks after she bought it in 1972. Carlson found it while checking for AIS and cleaning out trash near a dock.
“There’s lots of garbage and golf balls,” Carlson said. “I carry a large lobster collection bag. Whenever I do this stuff I pick up every little bit of garbage I find and chuck it, but there’s lots of things in our lake.”
Helping hands
Dive team members rarely end up in the spotlight for the work they do, but they serve important roles in providing families closure and finding evidence.
“It’s very hard on families when their loved one is at the bottom of a lake or river and hasn’t been recovered,” Carlson said. “Once that recovery happens, it starts the grieving process. Until then they’re kind of in limbo.”
They also serve the community in preventative ways such as teaching water safety for school groups. Likewise, their role in the fight against AIS is important.
“Cass County tells us which lakes they’d like us to search each year,” Frana said. “They give us a list and we try to either incorporate that into our monthly trainings or go out specifically to do searches. They might give us a lake and tell us there’s been a report of zebra mussels.”
For some AIS, like zebra mussels, it’s too late to eradicate them by the time they can be seen by the naked eye.
“Unfortunately, with zebra mussels right now, there’s not a treatment,” Gutzmann said. “So if we confirm that they’re there, they are just there. The benefits of finding them early is getting that lake listed as infested.”
Even in those cases, early detection by people like Hill puts the users of those lakes on alert. The DNR and lake associations can then put up signs warning traveling boaters and create plans to prevent boats leaving their landing with more AIS hitchhikers.
“It helps counties, lake associations and everyone to put up signs and be more aware when people are putting boats in and out,” Hill said. “And then they have wash stations and things like that to help prevent the spread from one lake to another. The earlier they can get the word out, the better it will be.”
“I would love it if every boater treated every lake like it’s infested and be careful about what they’re doing, what water they’re transporting and making sure the weeds are cleaned off,” Gutzmann said. “Having lakes listed as infested does make people pay a little extra attention. Water is a big one with zebra mussels. The eggs, called veligers, up to a million of them could be in a single cup of water.”
In the case of some AIS, early detection may provide a chance to manage the spread. Early detection puts those battling AIS ahead of the curve in a position to start working.
“Species like Eurasian watermilfoil and starry stonewort,” Gutzman said. “If we catch them early, they can actually do rapid response with hand pulling efforts to try to get those sites controlled and managed. The smaller they are, the less expensive it is and the better management techniques we have.”
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Zebra mussels, like these found on a native mussel, can outcompete native species and threaten their survival.
FAR RIGHT: Two zebra mussels, just like this, were found by Corry Hill and his son, members of the Lakes Area Dive Team, to confirm their presence in Leech Lake.
Contributed photos
“It fits in with what we’re doing already anyway,” Hill said. “We try and train all the time and we want to be in the water a lot, so it just fits in with our whole team model and everything.”
Risky work
Working underwater is not without its risks. Besides having a limited air supply, divers can only dive for so long in a given day.
In addition, while constant training and careful preparation generally keeps the dive team safe, their work does put them at risk of mishap whether that be hypothermia during ice dives, incidents involving boaters on the lake or equipment malfunction. Divers are always taking a controlled risk.
However, they are constantly adding new tools to their repertoire to extend the amount of time they can spend hunting safely, and to provide them with additional information on what awaits beneath.
In some cases that includes partnering with area law enforcement to use aerial drones or sonar that’s towed behind a boat.
“I participated in a recovery east of Backus,” Frana said. “There were two men on a boat. It turned sharply and both of them were ejected from the boat. One managed to get back in and the other went under. We contacted Crow Wing County because they have a ‘tow fish.’ It’s a sonar that’s suspended from the boat to follow the topography of the lake bottom better.”
Recently, they have been working to raise funds for an underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle, commonly referred to as an underwater drone. These ROVs are equipped with a live camera feed and an articulated arm to perform some tasks.
“We submitted a request to the Neilson Foundation in Bemidji at the end of the year,” Frana said. “We were notified that we have received half of the funding. We already had half. Now we’re in the process of narrowing it down to one of two different brands of ROV.”
These tools allow divers to search the bottom of the lake before they have ever set foot in it. In some cases this could mean finding what they are looking for before starting to use the limited air in their tanks. These ROVs could cut some search times down by hours.
On top of that, connected to a generator, the ROV can run practically forever.
“We can search and narrow things down so that divers have a more targeted entry into the water and won’t have to be in the water as long,” Frana said. “It’s definitely a safety enhancing device and it’s the future.”
The device may also expand their limits.
“Our depth capability will be quite a bit deeper than we can dive with our dive teams, which helps quite a bit,” Carlson said. “There are places like Walker Bay that are deeper than we can safely dive. We can do it with the ROV.”
Even with the ROV, the dive team will still put in plenty of time in the water supporting local events, law enforcement, emergency services and local environmental services. Most of the dive team is from the Walker area, though some come from the Bemidji, Park Rapids and Akeley areas.
“It’s fantastic to have local volunteer divers going out there and looking for AIS and being part of the solution,” Gutzmann said. “They are also great about telling me how they decontaminate their suits and all their equipment between dives, which I think is important too.”
TRAVIS GRIMLER is a staff writer for the Pineandlakes Echo Journal weekly newspaper in Pequot Lakes/Pine River. He may be reached at 218-855-5853 or travis.grimler@pineandlakes.com.
