With his scruffy goatee and silver hoop earrings, Alex Johnson of Vadnais Heights looked a bit like a pirate emerging from Lake Phalen with buried treasure.

He was part of a scuba crew that spent Saturday morning about 25 feet below the lake surface looking for trash. Johnson’s big find? A large broken light fixture.

“It doesn’t clean itself,” Johnson said of the urban lake located in St. Paul and Maplewood — the centerpiece of the Phalen Regional Park System.

Johnson joined 23 other divers from three different dive groups in the eighth annual event organized by BSA Venture Crew 820 and the Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society. Several teens who participated were Scouts.

BSA uses events like these to help the community and to give Scouts an opportunity to dive.

Johnson said he’d dived in Lake Phalen about five years ago and was disgusted with all the garbage he found at the bottom of the lake. He had just returned from his honeymoon in Maui where he was impressed with how clean the residents kept the reef.

“Why can’t we do this here in Minnesota?” he said he asked himself. Then last night, he came across Dean Soderbeck’s BSA flyer to help clean Lake Phalen and decided to help out.

Expecting the same trash he saw before, Johnson was surprised by the improvements he believes were made by BSA’s efforts.

“It is significantly better than when I was here before,” he said.

Soderbeck said he and his organization have adopted the lake and have found many other odd treasures over the years, such as a two-liter bottle of unopened vodka that he poured out because he was with teenagers.

“One guy found a plastic Uzi with the orange tip painted black,” he said. “I would have been scared to see that.”

He said the lake, which has a sandy beach, actually has a gravel bottom. He’s seen debris from an old swimming platform from the 1950s about 25 feet down and a man-made stone wall that helped stop up the lake and kept it from draining.

Water temperatures where the divers swam Saturday went down to the low 40s, Soderbeck said. Related Articles Marchers shut down I-94 through St. Paul to protest Breonna Taylor decision

Metro Transit workers reject contract offer, vote to authorize strike

St. Paul man charged in connection with gang-related drive-by shooting

St. Paul City Council approves $600,000 charge for downtown improvement district

St. Paul schools superintendent gets high marks, but board wants progress on equity, enrollment, student achievement

“There was a picnic table down there,” said Zach Hofius, 15, who had come out to help with the effort.

Hofius, a master diver, said his favorite dive was the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Lake Phalen can’t really compete, but Hofius said he enjoyed himself anyway.

“It’s kind of fun to clean up the lake,” he said.