COMING HOME: Divers recover bodies from deep water

For 15 years, she was known as "the girl whose father is in the lake."

Residents of her small, Wyoming town would look out on their nearby lake and see beauty, while she saw only a watery expanse that - somewhere out there - held her loved one's remains.

After all that time, this individual learned about a Kuna, Idaho, couple named Gene and Sandy Ralston, who specialized in the search and recovery of drowning victims. She contacted Ralston & Associates and they packed up their high-tech vessel to make the trip.

"We found him quickly," Gene Ralston said. "And then divers were able to recover his wedding ring, his wallet, his glasses - everything."

This summer, the Ralstons traveled to North Idaho and returned the bodies of two men to their families. Jeremy Heckert had been missing for three weeks when the Ralstons found him in Lake Pend Oreille on July 29. Upon hearing that the couple was in the region for that search, law enforcement officials in Coeur d'Alene asked them to assist in their efforts to find 16-year-old Reggie Nault, the former Coeur d'Alene High student-athlete who was recovered from more than 120 feet of water off of Arrow Point on Aug. 3, after two weeks of unsuccessful search attempts on the lake.

"Gene and Sandy Ralston are angels on this earth, finding lost loved ones one body of water at a time, providing closure and giving family members and friends a place to visit and pay their respects," said the boy's father, Andy Nault, noting that the recovery allowed the family to bury Reggie. "There is no fair price to put on their services. No amount of money in this world would ever cover what they did for us and I'll forever feel in debt to them."

Reggie, who has family in both Bonner and Kootenai counties, was the 101st recovery for Ralston & Associates since they actively began operations in 2000. Prior to that time, most searches for drowning victims had been limited to the surface of the water and the shoreline. It was that way when the couple heard a broadcast news report in 1983 about a woman who was missing in the Boise River. Because the river was at flood stage and authorities there had virtually no equipment suitable to the task at the time, the Ralstons volunteered one of their custom aluminum boats.

"I suggested that we might be able to help," said Gene. "We found her almost immediately.

"The thank you we got from her family really brought home how important it was to bring these drowning victims back to their loved ones," he added.

Fast-forward to 1999, when the Ralstons heard that side-scan sonar was being tested with great success in deep-water recovery operations. The fees that were being charged by the few companies providing those services, however, were sky high.

"I was so impressed with the technology and so terribly unimpressed by the people using it that I told my wife, 'This is something we need to do,' Ralston recalled.

"Within three weeks of taking possession of the equipment, we found our first drowning victim - and we've never looked back," he added.

That recovery took place in Bear Lake, Utah, where a 24-year-old man had drowned after jumping from a boat for a swim. Official search efforts already had been called off when Ralston & Associates arrived at the lake to test the sonar gear in a deep-water search setting. Using information about the last known sighting of the victim, as well as points where search dogs had alerted his possible presence, the couple focused their efforts on an area where water depths averaged about 150 feet and found the man that same afternoon.

Traditional means such as divers and search dogs still are used in recovery operations where the victims are found in shallow water, but the use of side-scan sonar and remote operated vehicles comes into play in depths that would put dive teams at risk. Many jurisdictions will only allow divers to descend to depths of 80-100 feet.

"Certainly, in the kind of deep water we specialize in, there's no other way to recover a drowning victim," Ralston said. "It has really revolutionized search and recovery operations."

The side-scan sonar is housed in a "towfish," which is attached to a cable and travels through the water a few feet above the bottom. Reflected acoustic "returns" produce an image similar to an aerial photograph, which is viewed in real time on a computer in the boat, christened the "Kathy G." after a woman named Kathy Garrigan, who drowned after falling from her canoe in an Alaskan lake in 2007 and was subsequently found by the Ralstons.

Using the combination of sonar and a remote operated vehicle, the couple now has recovered three drowning victims from Lake Pend Oreille, which presents its own, unique set of challenges for search and recovery.

"The depth is the biggest issue," Ralston said. "We searched for a fellow near Bayview where we got into 850 feet of water."

In such cases, he explained, Sandy has become a master at the helm - an important skill, since the towfish might be at the end of nearly 900 feet of cable and vessel speeds are limited to less than one mile per hour.

In 2015 dollars, investing in an equivalent vessel and equipment would cost close to $300,000, according to Ralston, who said his analog gear performs so well that he has not been tempted to update to newer, digital models of the same equipment. The price tag has caused some companies involved in the search and rescue field to charge as much as $30,000 for their services - a price tag that far exceeds anything Ralston & Associates has ever charged.

"Unfortunately, this quote-unquote 'industry' attracts people who know that families will pay unlimited amounts of money to recover a loved one," said Ralston, whose only charge is a $1-per-mile travel fee for he and his wife to bring their RV and boat to a recovery site. "Most of our searches are in the $1,000-$2,000 range, with mileage being the big expense."

In the past 15 years, the Ralstons have traveled most of the 50 United States, as well as into Canada to conduct searches. Many of the operations are considered closed cases, coming weeks after law enforcement officials have given up their efforts.

"But we've found people who have been missing two, four, even 15 years," said Ralston. "A couple of years ago, we found a man who had been missing in a lake in Canada for 29 years."

Not at all coincidentally, Gene and Sandy Ralston have spent much of each year on the road since first acquiring their search equipment in 2000. And though Sandy has recently encouraged her husband to consider retirement - or at least slowing down - Gene doesn't see any vacations in his immediate future.

"I would feel very guilty sitting on a beach somewhere knowing that there was someone who needed our help," he said. "When a mother or father calls and says, 'My child is missing,' how do you say no?

"The only way that's going to happen is if both my legs are broken."

For more information on the Ralstons' search and recovery work, visit online at: http://gralston1.home.mindspring.com/Sidescan.html