Five years ago, while scouring the depths of the American River, Karl Bly found a prosthetic leg. 

“I see this foot through the water,” the 59-year-old treasure hunter recalls, explaining how he typically dons a snorkel mask and flippers and lies atop his kayak so he can paddle, face in the water, until he observes something that interests him. “I dove down, saw the mechanics of the leg.” He pulled it out of the water and returned to his boat. 

Bly runs a volunteer group called American River Lost & Found. He keeps more than a dozen kayaks, canoes and inflatables in his yard, garage and strapped atop his car, along with buckets filled with scores of oars and paddles. He has more than 30,000 followers on Instagram and 64,000 on Facebook. 

After his unusual find five years ago, while still in his kayak, Bly posted a photo. By the time he returned to shore a few hours later, he says, more than 100,000 people had viewed the post, and groups around the Sacramento region, including ones that work with veterans, had circulated it in the hope of reuniting the person with their missing leg. 

Soon afterward, the owner, a dockworker in Oakland, contacted Bly. He had walked to the river, gotten into his raft, taken off his leg and wedged it into an attached supply raft, then watched in horror when it fell overboard amid the rapids. Bly was only too happy to return the prosthesis, as a new one can cost tens of thousands of dollars. He doesn’t charge for his services but is sometimes remunerated by donations or services in kind. (One recent client, a garage door repairman, now fixes Bly’s garage door for free.) 

Diving for lost items has been Bly’s passion for more than half a century, since his father, Edwin, a Navy veteran, first took him and his siblings out on American River treasure hunts in the mid-1970s. “As a kid, I was always excited about treasure hunting,” Bly says, then adds impishly, “As a teenager, I realized it was a good place to get a beer!” 

When he was 10 years old, he fished a California Highway Patrol officer’s wallet out of the water, then spent hours leafing through the phone book and calling every family with the officer’s last name until he eventually stumbled on the owner. For his troubles, he was rewarded with $20 and a CHP baseball cap. “It was the proudest moment for me. I felt like I was part of society.”

These days, Bly makes most of his money renting out properties in the region; the lost-and-found work, he explains, is more of an obsessive hobby. There is a lure to the river that continually draws him in. He loves finding things, and, in equal measure, gets a charge from hanging out by the San Juan Rapids, rescuing boaters who, as regular as clockwork, end up in trouble in the churning waters.

Through word of mouth, people know that if they drop their phone, a wedding ring or their prescription glasses into the murk, Bly is the one to call. On a near-daily basis, especially in summer, he is contacted by people desperate to find something they have lost. Improbably, given how vast the river is, if they tell him where they were when they lost it, Bly knows the flows and currents well enough to have more than a fighting chance of finding it. 

Once, a woman asked him to find the tail of a mermaid costume she lost to the river during a photo shoot. He managed to locate the tail, which he delightedly called “the catch of the day,” and was invited to hang out with a bevy of local mermaids. He never followed up on the offer, he says, somewhat sheepishly.

Of course, most of what falls into the river never gets claimed. In a makeshift office out back of his garage, Bly keeps an extraordinary array of found items: boxes of silt-covered sunglasses, the Ray-Bans carefully separated from the others; boxes of prescription glasses; hundreds of unclaimed waterlogged phones; statues of Hindu deities, some apparently placed in the river as part of ritual-immersion or retirement practices; umbrellas; drones and fishing poles. There are also more than a few Apple Watches, their circuitry destroyed by time underwater, as well as two guitars and plenty of jewelry — each piece carefully tagged with the found location in case someone reaches out, claiming to have lost a valuable item. 

He also keeps a bottle full of used syringes, many found near encampments along the river.

These days, the river work doesn’t come quite as easily as it used to. Bly’s back is starting to ache from all the paddling, and there are days when he asks his wife to drive him upstream so he only has to paddle with the current. Acknowledging this, he has printed American River Lost & Found T-shirts with the mantra “go with the flow.” Going with the flow is easier on his back, he’s realized, as he approaches his seventh decade.

But no matter how much time tries to catch up with him, Bly can’t imagine ever fully stopping his treasure-hunting adventures. “I bring the river to people who don’t normally go out there or experience these things,” he says. “It’s a special, unique thing.”

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