| Naturally, we wanted to hear stories from his adventures on the job and it turns out it was even more dangerous than we would have expected, as Ray recounted a pair of circumstances that had him wondering if he would survive.
Ray was part of the Underwater Recovery Team whose job it was to locate drowning victims, as well as search for critical sunken items, such as murder weapons. Ray’s tenure began before his group had underwater communication equipment or remote search devices. And this wasn’t swimming among coral reefs; no, this was often in icy water that could be dark or muddy. Ray recalled for us the time some poor guy had been working a construction site in snowy conditions and, having mistaken the location of the road, drove a Bobcat onto a frozen-over quarry, going through the ice. That one was memorable because Ray ran out of air while down deep, and had to be pulled to the surface by a safety rope. He also remembered another close call, when he and a dive partner were looking for a body in a lake with no visibility. Ray got tangled in commercial fishing nets as his partner disappeared in the black water. It was only thanks to his dive knife that Ray was able to cut himself loose and make it back to the surface.
A Brief Bio
Let’s back up and fill in some background on Ray. He grew up in Burnaby, British Columbia (not far from Seattle, Victoria and Whistler). His dad and granddad were chiefs of fire departments, which left young Ray yearning for something similar but different: he chose the North-West Mounted Police, what would become the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Reflecting back on his early days on the job, one memorable day was when he stopped a pair of young bicyclists riding on the wrong side of the road. One of those two cyclists would later become his wife, Judy Steen. She went on to become a pharmacist and the couple have three daughters and four grandkids. Retired now, the couple live in Winnipeg, and this will be their fourth winter at The Resort. (Photo: That’s Ray in his old uniform, alongside wife Judy.) |
