Lake Tahoe fisherman reels in lost images

By Brett Prettyman, Salt Lake Tribune

For a few minutes after the splash, Jana LeVitre hoped she could get her camera back from the bottom of the amazingly clear waters of Lake Tahoe.

The Pentax camera was, after all, waterproof.

Courtesy Jana LeVitre More than 1,000 images were found on a camera lost by Jana LeVitre when she dropped her Pentax camera in Lake Tahoe in September of 2011. Angler Stephen Garnett caught the camera while fishing 200-feet deep for lake trout on Jan. 19, 2014 and Jamie Clark pulled the card out of the camera and stuck in a computer. She found the images and decided to find the owner of the camera. It took five days using Facebook to find LeVitre in South Jordan, Utah.

Jana LeVitre thought this and more than 1,000 other images were gone forever. Photo/Jana LeVitre

But when somebody on the sailboat told her the water below was 150 to 200 feet deep, she reluctantly bid adieu to a collection of more than 1,000 photos and videos taken over five years. This was in September 2011.

But last week, she saw an image she had lost — on her Facebook page.

“Is this you? Or a very close look-alike?” asked the Facebook friend who posted the photo.

Stephen Garnett was just hoping to catch a lake trout when he ventured out with a friend for some fishing Jan. 19 on Lake Tahoe. He ended up hooking a fishing story that stretched all the way to South Jordan, Utah.

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