They Found Your Lucky Flasher(s): Divers Clean Columbia, Dozens Of 360 Setups At A Time

By Andy Walgamott

I remember fishing snaggy Humpy Rock on the Skykomish back in high school and after losing yet another drift fishing rig to its depths, thinking to myself that it would be pretty cool to dive the hole and get my salmon gear back – as well as all the other rigs that were no doubt down there.

Vlad Siryk (right) and his buddy Damien hoist a massive tangle of flashers, bumpers, cannonballs and lures they recovered diving the Columbia River earlier this year. The duo met through an underwater hockey league and Damien invited Siryk on a “recovery mission” this past spring that soon “spiraled out of control” as they found themselves salvaging snags up to five days a week. (VLAD SIRYK)

It was more of an idle daydream, one you’ve probably had too as fishy waters ate yet another setup. But for one Northwest angler/outdoor enthusiast and his buddies, doing just that has become a reality that’s yielded preposterous numbers of flashers, hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of lead cannonballs, swivels and bumpers for days, enough stuffer baits and blades to fully restock the shelves of several tackle stores, millions of views across multiple social media channels, and incalculable good karma points for helping clean up our rivers.

Vlad Siryk first came to my attention last May when he offered something of a counterpoint to the infamous Drano Lake fight video filmed on the banks of the Toilet Bowl this past spring Chinook season. Diving the salmon-rich Columbia Gorge backwater, he and friends came across old pilings that in the murk looked like bizarro Christmas trees, so much gear decorated them.

After cleaning up what they could there, more videos followed over the summer as they desnagged other well-known meat holes, and by fall they were on the Lower Columbia on a series of “special assignments.” When an angler contacted Siryk over Facebook about a pair of lost rods, they dove the spot and Siryk’s buddy Damien had the complete setups back on board in half an hour, and they also brought up a couple buckets’ worth of old and fresh-out-of-the-wrappers flashers.

“It’s a win-win-win for everybody involved,” Siryk stated on a YouTube Shorts video about the all-around good turn.

Indeed, while many of us try to leave the river banks cleaner, there’s a whole other world below the surface that needs love too. So who are these guys and how’d they get into this? We caught up with Siryk for more.

Northwest Sportsman Tell me about yourself – where’d you grow up? Where do you live now? How old are you?

Vlad Siryk I’m 27, I was born in Ukraine, moved to the U.S. when I was 4 and lived on the East Coast till I was 21. I moved out to Vancouver, Washington, six years ago in pursuit of a fresh start and a more adventurous lifestyle. 

NWS Looking at your videos on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, I kinda get the sense that you like all facets of the outdoors – fishing, snowboarding, cliff jumping, surfing, sometimes all in the same day – but how did you get into diving?

VS The Pacific Northwest offered everything my childhood dreams consisted of. I quickly got involved in everything it had to offer – snowboarding, surfing, kiteboarding, cliff jumping, etc. After an aggressive couple years of charging hard in the extreme sports world, I beat myself up pretty well and started dealing with more and more injuries, especially in my lower back. Then in May 2021 I had a bad snowboard accident that completely changed my life. My lower back has never been the same since that day and I had to give up most of my hobbies. 

It took a big toll on me because my happiness and purpose of life stemmed from my hobbies and passion for adventure and adrenaline. I sought professional help for years from chiropractors, physical therapists, body work specialists, masseuses, doctors, etc. Nothing really helped. Over time and lots of PT, I was able to get back into some of my hobbies, but never to the same capacity as I was. 

Around this time, I really started enjoying spending time in the water and diving because it was one of the only things I could do that was for the most part pain-free. As a guy who always grew up having a weird fear of water and what lives under it, this was the perfect mixture of adrenaline and adventure that was missing in my life during this period of rehab. I started diving in our local clear lakes and smaller rivers and streams searching for lost Apple watches and GoPros and whatever else I could find. 

Then I heard about guys spearfishing on our coast and that was a crazy idea to me because the water is freezing, murky and rough, not to mention (has) great white sharks, sea lions, whales and everything else that lives out in our ocean. This was a big fear to overcome for me. As a kid, I would be scared to look under the water on vacation where the water was crystal clear and warm. But something I was born with is this weird attraction to things I fear most and overcoming them; it’s an addiction in itself. 

So it didn’t take long before I became obsessed with spearfishing on the Oregon and Washington Coast. It took a couple years of diving and learning our oceans, tides, swell, etc., to get to a place where I felt comfortable and was well educated on good foraging grounds for fish, scallops, crabs and all types of delicious shellfish our coast offers.

Recovering from lower back problems, Siryk took up diving, then discovered spearfishing. He readily admits that while his videos might show big hauls, there’s often a bunch of other trips that didn’t pan out behind them. (VLAD SIRYK)

NWS What’s it like spearfishing and diving for crabs and other shellfish on the coast? That’s something that 99.8 percent of other Northwest sportsmen have never experienced.

VS Diving for crab and other shellfish on our coastline is an extremely addicting hobby, first because it’s not as easy as it seems. I may post a video of me holding up a bag full of Dungeness crab on my Instagram and brag about how it took me only 30 minutes, but the part that I’m not bragging about is that I previously went out five other times and was skunked due to terrible visibility, strong currents or just the fact that there were just no legal crab for me to keep down there.

Same goes with shooting a 20-pound lingcod or even finding scallops. It’s never an easy mission, you never get used to getting into freezing water and there is nothing romantic about diving for hours on end searching for that one fish or that crab in freezing water where you can’t even see your feet below you. But when you do land that 20-pound lingcod or when you are holding that bag full of Dungeness crab or when you are having a raw scallop buffet up on the boat with the boys after prying them off rocks 45 feet deep, it’s a feeling that’s hard to compare to most things we experience in our day-to-day life. 

NWS How did you go from foraging for your dinner underwater to finding the gear other anglers lost while trying to catch their own dinner? How many of you guys are at any one dive? Tell me about the crew.

VS The switch from foraging for food to foraging for fishing gear is a funny one. I joined an underwater hockey league here in town where we play every Tuesday, and yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Definitely a sport only for people who really love spending time underwater. 

So naturally I met some really cool guys who share a similar passion for the underworld. Specifically, two guys, Damien and Derek. Damien has been diving for gear for a couple years and he invited me to go join him for a recovery mission in the springtime. It was an exhilarating experience and I quickly discovered another addiction. It was just the perfect storm: We cleaned up the rivers; we cleared the snags for fishermen (including ourselves) who fish these waters; we’re practicing our diving skills, holding our breath and becoming better divers; and we’re able to put a little money in our pocket after we sell back to the fishermen. I made a video about it and it got a lot of traction and people loved it. 

We then started diving all sorts of popular fishing rivers, recovering all sorts of fishing gear and lead. It was just shocking to see how much stuff is left behind unintentionally by fishermen, especially in rivers that get fished hard. So we spent this whole summer diving tributary rivers, cleaning them up. I documented all of it, posting on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. There isn’t much money to be made there because most of the gear isn’t worth much to begin with. After the whole summer I made $100 after selling a full bucket of lead I collected from these dives, haha.

But things really got out of control towards the end of summer when we decided to focus specifically on the Columbia River and the trollers. Derek joined the party and this was a dangerous trio. We all have what you can call an addictive personality, so when we got to the bottom of the Columbia and saw how much work there is to do and how many snags there are to recover, our lives spiraled out of control. Work, family and basic human needs all started getting neglected in our lives and we started diving three to five times a week.

“… (When) you do land that 20-pound lingcod or when you are holding that bag full of Dungeness crab or when you are having a raw scallop buffet up on the boat with the boys after prying them off rocks 45 feet deep, it’s a feeling that’s hard to compare to most things we experience in our day-to-day life.” (VLAD SIRYK)

NWS You have to be really safety conscious, given all the hooks and line and stuff in the water. Are there snags that you and your buddies have come across and decided it wasn’t worth risking your lives for? What is that line you won’t cross to salvage a 360 flasher or 3.5 spinner in Mexican flag? Any close calls?

VS Even though we all got a couple loose screws, when it comes to safety, we try our best not to compromise. What’s different about our diving is we don’t use scuba tanks, minus two occasions where we used tanks. Otherwise, we are recovering all this gear holding our breath, which makes it a lot more dangerous. But we do it this way because we enjoy the challenge and this is the ultimate training for our breath-hold and spearfishing. Even though we’re all great divers and we can all go down past 100 feet on a single breath-hold, this doesn’t go to say how fast things can go wrong. All it takes is one hook to get stuck in you while working a snag at the bottom of the river and you never resurface. 

That’s why we have a method and system in place on how we deal with big, overwhelming snags. We have never turned down a snag yet, but actually, yesterday, we pulled over 175 flashers off one snag and it was the most challenging one yet. It was two massive tree stumps with roots that had tons of gillnet stuck in it, and this gillnet looked like the White House Christmas tree with how decorated it was in flashers, blades, lead and Super Baits. It was sitting at 30 feet and it was a very complicated snag due to the thickness and girth of the tangled gillnet. It took the three of us two hours of nonstop diving to clear this thing out. It was intense and pretty dangerous. 

One of the dives, Derek was pulling a flasher out from the gillnet and his dive watch got tangled in it. He stayed calm and had to pull so hard his dive watch broke off, once again another situation that could’ve ended really bad. But Damien and I were right above him at the surface, so if he never resurfaced, we would’ve gone down and pulled him out. Derek also got a hook stuck in his calf last week while bringing a big rope full of snags to the surface. We have to keep an eye out for that guy, but luckily, he’s an incredible diver.

Safety is a huge consideration as Siryk and buddies work underwater around hooks, thick fishing line and even gillnets while holding their breaths. They’ve discovered that gillnets hung up on pilings tend to create real snagfests. (VLAD SIRYK)

NWS How many flashers, spinners, cannonballs do you collect on an average dive? What’s the most ever? Is it predictable where the snags will be, outside of, say, terminal fisheries? What do you do with it all??!?

VS So remember how I said this whole thing spiraled out of control for us? Well, I wasn’t lying. Just in the past week (in late September), we’ve pulled out over 1,000 flashers, hundreds of pounds of cannonballs and hundreds of Super Baits, blades, bumpers, etc. But keep in mind, some of this gear has been sitting down here for years and it’s in tough shape, so most of it isn’t even resellable.

NWS I love how you hide some of your hauls as Easter eggs, per se, for anglers to find – they respond so fast, a testament to all your followers. But the guides must love it too, not having to pay retail to replace stuff clients lose – are they on speed dial or what?

VS All the good flashers we sell for $10. Typically, everything else we sell at 50 percent off what the fishing stores sell it at and, yes, the fishermen love it. First, because it’s cheaper; second, because some of them come and get their lucky flasher or blade back. The guides love us too. Sometimes a guide will put us on his most hated snag and we’ll clear it out for him and then he gets all his favorite flashers back and the snag is gone. It’s a win-win for everyone.

NWS I can’t applaud you enough for helping clean up our waters, but does the volume of all the lost gear surprise you? I don’t know how this would work, but any thought about doing this as a contract service for, say, the Departments of Fish and Wildlife or the sportfishing industry? 

VS I will admit, the amount of lost fishing gear in our rivers is alarming. I know it’s unintentional and I have lost my fair share of gear in these waters, but that’s something that the state has to keep in mind when they sell close to a million fishing licenses each year. The salmon industry is a $1.5 billion recreational industry just in Washington. The state can afford to send out some guys like my buddies and I to go clean the river up and do their part if they’re going to allow and charge millions of anglers to come fish our waters. I’m sure it’s something not too many people think about because they simply can’t see what’s going on down there, but after spending a lot of time in our waters, I would highly recommend that someone starts thinking about it. 

NWS Ever used gear you just salvaged to go and catch salmon or steelhead?

VS Yes, we’ve definitely caught fish on recovered gear; if anything, that stuff works better because typically when guys are trolling they don’t plan on losing their $50 trolling setup, so they run their best gear and that’s usually the stuff that performs best. So we’re in possession of a lot of people’s lucky lures, haha 

Also, a lot of guys have bought from us now and we’ve had at least 10 boats pull up to us in the past couple weeks and say how they just put a fish in the boat with something we sold them. Love to see it!

“With our rugged and wild coastline to our vast mountains and freshwater rivers that have some of the best salmon runs in the world, the PNW is truly a gem. It’s our job to do our part and to take care of this gift that we are given,” states Siryk, here with Damien and a big snag pulled out of the North Fork Lewis River. (VLAD SIRYK)

NWS What’s the weirdest, most random thing you’ve found diving?

VS Surprisingly, nothing too crazy. A lot of trash and rubbish, sunglasses, phones, vapes, boat parts, fishing rods, the occasional sturgeon.

NWS Any closing thoughts?

VS In the last six years I have completely fallen in love with the PNW and all it has to offer. Growing up in Massachusetts for 12 years and living in North Carolina for five years, I have realized that people truly don’t understand how special this place is. With our rugged and wild coastline to our vast mountains and freshwater rivers that have some of the best salmon runs in the world, the PNW is truly a gem. It’s our job to do our part and to take care of this gift that we are given. But more importantly, it’s the state’s job to do its part as well. I’m not exactly sure if there are any programs set up for specific fishing gear river cleanups, but basing off what I’ve seen underwater and the research I’ve done, it doesn’t look like it. 

My buddies and I will keep diving and cleaning these rivers; I will keep making content about it. But if the state ever wanted to propose a plan where we could work together to take better care of our rivers, we’d love to be a part of that conversation.

Editor’s note: Follow Vlad Siryk on YouTube (@bigwaterguy), Instagram (lion_king25) and TikTok (@lion__king25), as well as on Facebook.