Name:     Clint Koberstein	Profession:  Diver
Relationship:	Country:     United States of America
Ottawa Citizen.com Divers find plane, ending 50-year mystery Childhood story about lake monster spurred Ottawa man to begin search Geoff Nixon, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Sunday, November 18, 2007 When Guy Morin spotted the five letters painted on the tail of a sea plane lying on the bottom of Lac Simon last month, he knew he'd found what he'd spent more than a decade looking for. The five letters, CFHPK, were the call sign of a plane that went missing nearly 50 years ago. "It was like a rising," says Mr. Morin, 39, an electrical engineer who grew up in Gatineau and has lived in Ottawa for the past 12 years. "We knew we were on the spot." Three hunters -- Tony Chivazza, Louis Hamel, Philippe Ouimet -- and their pilot, Gaëtan Deshaies, were aboard the Republic RC-3 SeaBee when it was last seen on Nov. 21, 1957. Now, it's been found, sitting over 60 metres below the surface of the Papineau-area lake, covered with decades' worth of silt and sand. It's hoped the plane will hold the answers to its disappearance almost 50 years ago. The men had been on their way home from Lac du Diable, where they had been hunting. All told, seven men had taken part in the excursion. Next up, a trip to Schryer Lake to celebrate their success. One problem: the plane could only carry four passengers at one time. Mr. Morin's second-cousin, Roger Guénette, was among four men who'd already made the trip back to Schryer Lake. "He suffered from survivor's guilt," Mr. Morin says of his cousin. "He lived 24 years after the event and he was 32 years old when the event happened." According to records, the weather was less than ideal for a flight. There were high winds and heavy waves on local lakes, and snow squalls that, at times, made it impossible to see. It was so bad, Mr. Guénette's flight even landed on Lac Simon to wait it out. When the flight carrying the remaining three hunters and the pilot failed to arrive, an urgent search was launched. Transport Canada used 16 planes in the effort, but all they found were two hats and the body of a dog that had been on the plane. Mr. Morin was a young boy when he first learned about the missing plane. His family had a cottage near Lac Simon, and one summer his uncle told him the nearby lake contained a monster that once swallowed up a plane and four men. His parents confirmed part of his uncle's account -- yes, the lake had been the rumoured site where the men had disappeared. They also told him about the family's connection to the mystery. As he got older, Mr. Morin took up scuba diving, becoming increasingly skilled at water searches. It crossed his mind several times, he says, that he might one day find the missing plane. Mr. Morin eventually made friends in the diving community, whom he enlisted to help him look for the missing plane that had so captured his attention. Chris Koberstein of Hudson, Que., and Dan Scoville of Rochester, New York, helped him refine his search, using better technology and more sophisticated techniques in his more than 10-year quest to find the sunken wreck. They used a combination of individual dives, a deep-sea robot equipped with a camera and, eventually, sonar to plumb the lake's vast depths. On Oct. 2, they got their big break -- a chunk of the plane's main strut. Then, they found the plane itself. "We hit the wing and then we could see the entire plane," says Mr. Morin. "We started illuminating the plane, sweeping back and forth, and then we realized the thing is intact -- in one piece." And they found the remains of three men. A pair of boots was all they could find of the fourth man. The plane is largely intact, with the controls and gauges still in the cockpit. A rifle is tucked beside the pilot's seat. Mr. Morin and his friends will not say exactly where the wreck is, for fear that someone else will come along and disturb the site before it can be dealt with by the authorities. On Wednesday, a short segment about their search is scheduled to air on the Discovery Channel's popular Daily Planet show -- exactly 50 years to the day that the plane went down.