Inch by inch, this Chicago diver scours Lake Michigan’s floor for our lost stuff: ‘The guy everybody calls’

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Mike Lang was mid-high-five when he heard a faint ping against the bow of his boat.

Then came a clunk, as his wedding ring dropped 27 feet to the bottom of Lake Michigan.

Lang, 44, had been watching the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds perform in last month’s Chicago’s Air and Water Show from his boat, anchored about a mile and a half off Northerly Island. He and a friend were celebrating a particularly impressive flyover when the ring flew from his finger.

“As soon as I did that, I knew there was one person who could ever give me any type of fighting chance of it being found,” Lang said.

After recording his coordinates and dropping a glass bottle in the water to mark the spot, Lang called his longtime friend and dock neighbor, Yohei Yamada.

Yamada — a professional diver and boat captain — has developed a reputation for finding what other people can’t: rings, watches, keys and phones lost deep beneath the surface of Lake Michigan.

“If you ask anybody in the harbor system if they know a diver, typically they give out my number,” Yamada, 49, said.

Clients send him the approximate coordinates of where the object was lost and, for a few hundred dollars, Yamada sets out on his repurposed police boat — christened Chicago Diver, like his business — to search. Summers are the busiest, he said, as “people come out and just drop everything.”

Some items, like bikes and anchors, are easy to spot by sight. For others, like jewelry, Yamada has to use a pinpoint metal detector, searching the mud inch by inch. Sometimes, the dense weeds at the bottom of the lake reach lengths of 10 feet, requiring Yamada to cut through to reach the bottom. Other times, clouds of silt can limit visibility.

This year, Yamada said, he found four rings, a bracelet, a couple of wallets and 10 cellphones.

A particularly high-profile search was for a wedding ring belonging to former Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo in 2020. The player had lost some weight and, as he washed his hands at a fuel dock, the ring flew into Belmont Harbor, Yamada said.

Rizzo spoke to harbor employees and was directed to Yamada, who found the ring in about an hour and a half.

Meanwhile, Lang’s ring was a “tough one,” Yamada said, requiring two days of diving. Using the boat’s coordinates and the direction of the wind, he identified a search area of hundreds of feet of silt, rocks and shells.

On the first night, Yamada retrieved Lang’s bottle. The next day, he returned and discovered the ring.

“I’m amazed I found it,” he said. “I was excited to give it back to him.”

Yamada immediately texted Lang a wet-suited selfie, still dripping water and holding up the ring.

“I couldn’t believe what I was looking at,” Lang said. “He had somehow done the impossible again.”

The lake is calm as Yamada sets for a long day on the water on a recent summer day. First, he plans to search for a lost anchor and a window frame, before heading to a boat-cleaning job and captaining a private cruise in the evening.

He drops anchor in the Playpen — a designated boating area between Oak Street Beach and Navy Pier — and puts up a red and white flag to signal that there is a diver down. Then, he zips up his wet suit, unfurls a long hose connected to a compressor and hops in. For 30 minutes, a dark shadow moves underwater, circling the boat. Scattered bubbles pop at the surface.

Eventually, Yamada resurfaces with beer cans, lighters, sunglasses, two phones and a vape cartridge — but no anchor.

“It’s anticlimactic,” he says.

He climbs back onto the boat, switches on the engine and steers toward Monroe Harbor. As he pulls in, he points to an area of water, saying it’s the site of a ring he never found.

Usually, Yamada said, he finds what he’s looking for. But sometimes, inaccurate coordinates or a drifting boat make the search trickier. He scours the lake for hours, breathing through a tube that gives him unlimited “bottom time,” unlike a scuba diver who would run out of air.

“I don’t ever have to quit,” he said. “If something takes forever, I’m still down there working.”

Yamada, who was born in Tokyo, has spent most of his life in or on the water. He learned to swim at 5 or 6, after his family moved to Peoria for his father’s job as an engineer for the construction and mining equipment manufacturer Caterpillar Inc.

After spending portions of his middle and high school years in Switzerland, Yamada returned to the United States to attend the University of Illinois Chicago on a swimming scholarship. In the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Oak Street Beach.

Eventually, he was recruited to join a small team dedicated to rescuing people and retrieving bodies from the lake, where he learned to dive.

“It was not easy,” said Ron Dorneker, a friend of Yamada’s and a former captain of the unit. “We had a boss that was very strict and would throw things in the water and make us search.”

“From the very beginning, Yohei had a huge desire to learn,” Dorneker added.

Occasionally, Yamada said, people would ask him to look for their lost belongings and he would search in his own time. As he garnered a reputation around the city’s harbors, he realized that the work could be even more lucrative than lifeguarding and decided to strike out on his own.

“It wasn’t that I started it — it was that people asked,” he said.

Harbor officials said Yamada is usually their first recommendation when something is dropped in the lake.

“There are other people that do this type of work, but when somebody loses something really valuable, he’s the guy everybody calls,” Dorneker said.

Along with finding lost valuables, Yamada does underwater boat and harbor repair work — fixing broken propellers, rudders and worn-out chains — and, in the winters, works full time as the captain of a private boat in the Caribbean.

“Basically all my work is either underwater or on the water,” he said.

Yamada also does water safety and special effects for NBC’s “Chicago Fire” and “Chicago P.D.,” a gig he got through a mentor he met while lifeguarding.

“Throughout the years, you know, (NBC) would be like, ‘Hey, can you do this? Can you do that?’ And I never said no, so they started relying on me for harder and harder things,” he said.

IMDb credits him as a minor character in two episodes of “Chicago Fire” and with stunt work in three “Chicago P.D.” episodes.

“It’s fun,” he said. “It’s all different, weird things.”

Yamada also spends some of his leisure time submerged, playing underwater hockey, in which snorkelers use short sticks to maneuver a weighted puck into a goal.

Yamada says people are often fascinated by his work, but to him, “it isn’t that exciting.”

“It’s every day, it’s always work, work, work. People have just never heard of what I do, so that’s why they’re interested,” he said.

Still, he said, the water is peaceful.

“The air is clearer and it’s cooler,” he said. “There’s no one bothering you.”