RIVER OF SAND

Search And Recovery Diver Archer Mayo Plies The Columbia For Lost Items

STORY BY JANET COOK PHOTOS COURTESY OF ARCHER MAYO & BY JANET COOK

A 26-foot aluminum research vessel weighing 4,000 pounds isn’t the kind of thing that gets lost in the Columbia River every day. Nevertheless, it happened. In April 2017, four researchers from the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission were conducting a routine sea lion count below Bonneville Dam. What started as a calm morning turned blustery by the time the boat headed back upriver from Phoca Rock, a mid-river outcropping across from Multnomah Falls. A large wave broke over the bow, capsizing the boat. All four crew members were rescued from the water after the boat sank; one later died of his injuries.

The tragedy left the $85,000 boat at the bottom of the river. When specialized recovery divers came from Seattle to look for the boat, they were unable to find it despite knowing exactly where it sank.

It was a mystery tailor-made for Archer Mayo.

Mayo, of White Salmon, has a dive and recovery business himself called Underdog Dive, and specializes in finding items lost in the Columbia River and other nearby bodies of water. It’s usually smaller items — things like phones, keys, foils, fishing rods, drones, outboard motors. Last year, he recovered two bicycles from the bottom of the Willamette River near downtown Portland; they fell in when their unclad riders took a late-night dive from a floating dock after the annual World Naked Bike Ride.

When Mayo learned of the sunken boat in 2019, he set out to find it. “Between Rooster Rock and Beacon Rock, the river is so wild,” he says. “It’s below the dam so it has wild currents and tides. It’s the most beautiful part of the Columbia.” He spent every Friday throughout the summer diving in search of the boat. After nearly three months scouring “every square foot of 10 miles of river,” he found it — not far from where it sank.

“I found it by persistence, looking at anything, chasing down every little thing I saw,” he says. “The reason I couldn’t find it initially was because I didn’t understand that there are two rivers. There’s the river of water and the river of sand.” The boat was almost totally buried under sand and silt at the bottom of the river, with only about 10 square feet of aluminum visible. To extract the boat, he built a dredge, moved 22,000 pounds of sand and brought the boat to the surface using floatation bags.

“It was one of the best days of my life,” Mayo says. “I wish I had something to search for all the time. I love to do it.” For Mayo, it’s not just the satisfaction of finding a lost item — although that’s certainly rewarding. He loves the whole process, from the story of how an item was lost to forming a hypothesis about its most likely location to the actual diving.

“I get to meet people who are just really interesting,” he says. “And ninety percent of the time, I get their stuff back.”

Mayo, who had been doing dive recovery for a couple of years before the lost boat search, calls that his “graduate program” on the Columbia.

“I really learned a lot about its hydrodynamics and buoyancy,” he says. “I have a very different understanding of the river now.”

Mayo spent his childhood on the East Coast and in California, depending on where his father, a naval officer, was stationed. He learned to windsurf when he was 12 in Charleston, South Carolina, and read about the Columbia Gorge in the pages of Windsurf magazine. After college at the University of Alabama followed by a Peace Corps stint, he earned a master’s degree in industrial design at The Savannah College of Art and Design.

In 2000, on his way to settle in San Francisco, Mayo detoured to the Gorge for two weeks of windsurfing in the place that had held a mythical status for him since his youth. Then he headed south to the Bay Area, but when he hit San Francisco traffic he had a change of heart. He turned around and drove back to the Gorge, eventually settling in White Salmon.

Mayo became a certified scuba diver in 1989, but he’d been freediving for several years before that. “I would dive in the low visibility rivers in Charleston,” he says. “I got pretty confident diving in those conditions.” Still, he didn’t think much about diving in the Columbia River during his early years here.

He put together a life managing real estate, working as a fundraising auctioneer and pursuing his artistic path as a sculptor. He and his wife had two kids. In 2010, he was offered a six-month artist’s residency in Freemantle, Australia, where his interest in dive recovery was piqued after a visit to the Western Australia Shipwrecks Museum. He began working with maritime archaeologists and conservators who studied the hundreds of shipwrecks along the coast of Western Australia — many dating to the Dutch spice trade.

Mayo was captivated by shipwrecks and began creating shipwreck artifacts as part of his residency. For him, discovering a wreck was only part of the intrigue; he became fascinated by the entire story — the people, their lives, the possibilities of what transpired leading up to the tragedy. In a You Tube video about his shipwreck-related artwork, he describes the discovery of two late-19th century shipwrecks deep in the Indian Ocean during the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight