A camera lost in the Pacific Ocean during a shipwreck two years ago was found by chance earlier this month by a pair of university students on a research dive off the coast of Vancouver Island and then reunited with its owner thanks to a still-functional memory card and an old-fashioned community bulletin board.

Siobhan Gray, a dive and safety officer with the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, was on the boat the day the students, Tella Osler and Beau Doherty, surfaced with the camera, which by this time looked like a prop from a pirate movie.

The students had been on the final dive of a university credit scientific diving program run out of the centre when they found the device on the sea floor near Bamfield. The camera was covered in sea organisms, including a slow-growing algae, a couple of brittle stars and a sea cucumber, and its memory stick was coated in some sort of black growth, said Gray.

“My first thought about the camera was, are there still images on the card?” said Gray, who brought it back to shore. “I cleaned the contacts off of the (memory card) put it in my computer and it worked.”

Among the images and videos on the card were two in particular that caught Gray’s eye. One was a group photo that Isabelle Côté, a professor of Marine Ecology at SFU, tweeted along with photos of the camera itself in the hopes of finding its owner. For Gray’s part, she posted the photo on a community message board in town, asking for anyone who recognized the photo to contact her.

The other file of note was the one taken most recently — a video of the full moon over calm water shot just before midnight on July 31, 2012. Gray said that while watching the clip for the first time she had expected to see the video end with the camera sinking into the water en route to its temporary home on the sea floor.

About a week after the poster was tacked to the board, Gray was walking by it and ran into the local water taxi driver, who had seen the poster and said he thought the camera belonged to a man whose boat sank in a serious nighttime accident a couple years back. He wasn’t quite sure, but figured the Coast Guard might know something about it.

So Gray unpinned her poster and walked over to the Coast Guard station to show them the photo. It turns out one of Gray’s friends at the station had personally attended the call and agreed that one of the people in the photo might just be the man whose boat had been shipwrecked. After some digging through old files, the Coast Guard member called the man and left a message for him, along with Gray’s number.

On Wednesday evening Gray got a call from Paul Burgoyne, a Vancouver-area man who said he was the owner of the camera, adding that he had lost it when his boat sank shortly after the video was taken.

“He was thrilled. He says when he got off the phone with the Coast Guard him and his wife were laughing a great deal and mentioned how lucky he was,” she said.

The sinking of the ship had been a traumatic experience, he told Gray, and the discovery of the camera was a positive end.

Gray said the tale offered up a beautiful display of her community, having involved so many different people in the quest to solve the riddle of the sunken camera.

Burgoyne could not be reached Thursday for comment.

mrobinson@vancouversun.com