Mirror Lake Watershed Association Vice Chair Bill Billerman, left, and Jim Grant with Jim Tepedino's recovered DJI Phantom 2 drone at the annual Mirror Lake cleanup in Lake Placid on Aug. 13.

LAKE PLACID — Jim Grant has been volunteering his scuba diving skills in Mirror Lake for the past two decades, helping with annual lake cleanups sponsored by the Mirror Lake Watershed Association.

Over the years, a lot of his finds have become somewhat routine.

“A lot of cell phones, SUP paddles, fishing rods and wallets,” he said. “I turn them into the Lake Placid Police Department but they don’t have any money in them. I asked one of the cops ‘how come these things never have any money in them’ and he said, ‘well, they’re solen and people take the money out of it and they get rid of the evidence by throwing the wallet in the lake.”

Grant said the police are still able to return drivers’ licenses and other cards and items in the wallets to their owners, but they are often of little use, given that the wallets have been — in many cases — under the water for 20 years or more.

This year’s lake cleanup took place on Aug. 13. When Grant was diving in the middle of the lake, width-wise, near its southern shore, he came across some rather unusual wreckage: a sunken drone.

Jim Tepedino flies a drone at Heckscher State Park in Suffolk County on Nov. 8, 2016.

“I wasn’t sure what it was at first,” he said.

Grant brought the drone to shore, where he was able to make out a contact number for the drone’s owner, Jim Tepedino. Grant reached out.

“I’m sitting there watching TV and I get this text from somebody and I thought it was a joke at first,” Tepedino said. “(Grant) asked ‘did you lose a drone in Mirror Lake?’ I almost fell off the back of my chair.”

Tepedino’s initial disbelief stemmed from one thing: it had been a hair over a decade since he had last seen the drone, or given it much thought. Tepedino said he and his wife — who live on Long Island — come to the Lake Placid area every summer. On Aug. 11, 2014, Tepedino was flying his drone over Mirror Lake getting early morning pictures of the water and surrounding mountains.

“Mirror Lake is one of our favorite spots,” he said. “I said to my wife, ‘You know, I would love to take some shots of Mirror Lake, but we need to do it early in the morning when there’s nobody around because of how busy it gets in the summertime.”

Jim Tepedino with a drone at Heckscher State Park in Suffolk County on Nov. 8, 2016.

He launched the drone from near the Mirror Lake Public Beach. At first, everything was going as planned, Tepedino said. He had flown the drone several times earlier on his visit to the Olympic Region, and the drone had performed without issue.

“Then all of the sudden, I lost control of it and it started to take a dive bomb right into the lake,” he said. “Within seconds, it went right into the water. I mean, it was gone. This was the first time I lost a drone, and it was in the water.”

Tepedino said he was unable to recover the drone at the time because of where it had crashed over the lake. Grant said when he found it scuba diving, it was about 16 feet underwater.

Tepedino said he had treated himself to the drone — a DJI Phantom 2 — as an early birthday present. Tepedino said it cost about $1,200 back in 2014.

“That crashed on Aug. 11 and my birthday is the 12th, so that crash was my birthday present,” he said jokingly.

Tepedino’s nephew, Frank, was in Lake Placid when the drone was found this past August. Even though the drone itself was “totally trashed,” according to Grant, Frank arranged to pick it up from Grant and returned it to Tepedino, who was able to get the SD card out of the drone.

To Grant’s astonishment, despite spending over a decade in the lake, the SD footage was still intact and able to be replayed in its original full resolution.

“It was a mess but the card was still in there,” he said. “It was freshwater and I said ‘let’s see if there’s any images. I was amazed, it was all there. The only thing I didn’t get was the drone hitting the water.”

Tepedino made a video montage of some of the drone’s footage from its 2014 flights in the Olympic Region, including the moments leading up to the crash. Tepedino was also able to analyze the footage in an attempt to ascertain what went wrong on the drone’s final flight.

Tepedino’s experience with drones runs deep. He’s been flying them since they became available for recreational purposes. DJI was founded in 2006 and released its first commercially-available drone, the Phantom 1, in 2013.

“I’ve always been interested in photography and I’m kind of a nerd with technology so when DJI started producing these high quality drones, I just dove right in,” he said.

Tepedino is the president of the Suffolk Aero Modelers, a remote-control flying club on Long Island. He, along with several drone piloting instructors in the club, reviewed the Mirror Lake tapes. They came to the conclusion that it was a mechanical — as opposed to a signal connection — failure.

“One of my expert instructors said, ‘you know, Jim, I think you lost the propeller in flight and that’s why you lost total control of it,'” he said. “That’s why it goes from being nearly steady and then it starts to shake, then it takes the dive.”

He figured that some of the screws had come loose from previous flights. He said that despite this drone’s mishap, he has remained loyal to DJI, and said their drones are the ‘gold standard’ when it comes to reliability and picture quality, and they’ve continued to improve over the past decade.

“The DJI drones — the recreational ones — are unbelievable,” he said. “They’re reliable, they’re quality, just all of the other features that they put into them are unbelievable.”

His latest drone is the DJI Mini Pro 4. He said he enjoys taking it on vacations, and has not had any issues flying it.

“It’s phenomenal,” he said. “I’ve taken it to Aruba. I’ve taken it to Hawaii. No problems. The picture quality — and you can both photograph and video — is just absolutely terrific.”

Tepedino thanked Grant and the Mirror Lake Watershed Association for not only recovering his drone, but for all of the work removing debris over the years to keep the lake clean.

Grant, who grew up in Barrington, Rhode Island, has been scuba diving since he was a teenager.

“The minimum age for certification back then was 15, so when I was 15, I and all of my friends on the Middle School swim team all got certified and we’ve all been diving since then,” he said.

Grant said he has had the opportunity to scuba dive around the world, including the Red Sea, the South China Sea and the Caribbean, among other locations. He moved to Lake Placid after serving in the U.S. Marine Corps.

“I visited here in the summertime, and there’s just so much to do,” he said. “It’s a great place and I’ve never left.”

With talk of drones abuzz in the news over the past few weeks — spurred by scores of sightings of unidentified flying objects in the skies of New Jersey and surrounding states — Tepedino said what he’s seen is nothing like the drone’s he’s used to. He emphasized, however, that he was only going based on what he saw second-hand online.

“The videos I’ve seen on YouTube, they sound like jets,” he said. “They sound like small jets, maybe the size of an automobile. The drones that I’m accustomed to are quiet. I mean, they’re not silent, but they’re much quieter than that. Those (recent sightings in the news) are no drones that I’m accustomed to. They look and sound like they’re powered jets when they go by if you look at them on YouTube.”

Tepedino said he thinks the government likely knows what they are, and thinks that more information will be public eventually.

“From what I understand, the government knows what they are and they’re not saying,” he said. “We’ll know soon enough. Pretty soon, the government is going to spill the beans.”