GREEN BAY (NBC26) — Engaged couple Christie Barlament and Ed Bieber told NBC 26 how diving into local waterways to recover lost objects for people in their hour of need is more than just a hobby.
(The following is a transcription of the full broadcast story.)
I met two people who are giving back by going deep. I'm your Green Bay neighborhood reporter Pari Apostolakos. Engaged couple Christie Barlament and Ed Bieber told me how returning lost objects for people in their hour of need is more than just a hobby.
Dive into the broadcast story yourself below:
Ed Bieber started diving seven years ago to try getting his fishing lures back instead of buying new ones.
"I went in and realized that there's so many other lures," Bieber said. "There's fishing line, there's plastic, cans, trash, all kinds of stuff that didn't belong underwater. It began to become my mission to clean all that up."
Now, Ed, known as "Ed the Diver" dives full time, finding things people have lost in the water. Often with his fiancée, Christie Barlament.
"It's an amazing feeling to be able to return somebody's piece of property that they thought they lost," Barlament said. "Whether it be a phone, a wallet, an Apple watch. The looks on their faces, I mean they think it was gone forever."
But, they say, some recoveries mean even more.
In March, Christie and Ed went to the town of Texas, near Wausau, to find a phone in the Trappe river. One woman had lost the phone because she dove in after her husband's car crashed into the river. The man died in the crash.
Ed found the late man's phone and his wife's within minutes.
"They wanted those memories back, you know photos, videos, anything else that they had on there to, you know, so she could remember her husband by," Bieber said.
"To have some closure ... in that kind of situation ... it costs nothing to be kind," Barlament said. "We jumped in our truck immediately ... To meet her, give her a hug and embrace her, the tears, everything. It changed our lives forever and hers and it meant the world to us."
Christie and Ed are on a mission to make our waterways cleaner and the world a little kinder one dive at a time.
"People think just because you lose something in the water it won't be found. But, we get there," Barlament said.
"It's awesome to make a difference, kind of have a ripple effect on the community then go out and bring it all across the world," Bieber said.
Christie and Ed tell me there will be an exhibit here at the Neville Public Museum featuring some of their most interesting found objects this fall.
