Adventures with Purpose | ||||||||||
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YouTube information | ||||||||||
Channel | ||||||||||
Years active | 2018–present | |||||||||
Subscribers | 3.21 million [1] | |||||||||
Total views | 389 million [1] | |||||||||
Website | adventureswithpurpose | |||||||||
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Last updated: 20 July 2024 |
Adventures with Purpose is a group of professional, non-profit scuba divers who use underwater sonar imaging equipment and bathymetry mapping technology to locate missing persons and their vehicles in waterbodies. Originally focused on clean-up, their channel's focus was turned to missing persons cold cases after their accidental discovery of a missing person. The group documents their efforts on their YouTube channel.
Adventures with Purpose (AWP) was founded by Oregon-based Sam Ginn and Jared Leisek in 2019. [lower-alpha 1] [3] They began as an environmental cleanup agency, removing cars that were polluting waterways. [4] [5] Doug Bishop, a diver and manager of a towing company, also joined the group. [6] After twice finding cars with missing people in them, they determined a need to look for people who have gone missing in or with their vehicles. [7] The channel receives tip-offs and requests from the public through their social media accounts. [3] They do not pursue rewards from family or charge the families or police involved, but will not reject rewards if given. [8] Instead, AWP funds its searches through video views, subscribers, donations, and merchandise sales. [5] In 2020, AWP threatened to sue for a $100,000 reward pledged by five anonymous donors for the discovery of Ethan Kazmerzak, who had disappeared in 2013. [9] The Kazmerzak family donated an undisclosed amount. [5]
In October 2022, the team had six members. [7] The following month, Leisek was accused of raping a 9-year-old female relative at age 16–17 in Utah in 1992. Several team members, including Bishop, diver Nick Rinn, [10] and lead videographer Josh Cantu [11] subsequently left the team. [12] [13] On January 5, 2023, Leisek was charged in Sanpete County, Utah. [14] [15]
On January 7, 2023, Adventures with Purpose announced they are on a 3-month tour with a new team of divers and filmmakers. [16]
At the identified waterbody, [17] the team traverse the waters in small inflatable boats, scanning the bottom of the waterbody using sonar. Upon identifying areas of interest, they circle the area for further identification on their sonar displays before using a heavy-duty magnet to attach their line to the sunken vehicle. They mark the location with a buoy and then use divers to make a visual identification of the vehicle, retrieve a license plate, search for bodies, and prepare the vehicle and its contents for retrieval by police. [18]
The team usually deals with cold cases, [19] however they have also volunteered for searches in recent cases; an example would be searching on August 22, 2022, for Kiely Rodni, who went missing on August 6, 2022. [20] Certain recent cases may be incidental while searching the waterbody for a cold case. [21] As of June 2023, the group has solved 26 missing person cases. [21] AWP also sometimes cooperates with other teams with the same purpose, such as Exploring with Nug, Chaos Divers and Sunshine State Sonar. [22] [23]
Diving activities are the things people do while diving underwater. People may dive for various reasons, both personal and professional. While a newly qualified recreational diver may dive purely for the experience of diving, most divers have some additional reason for being underwater. Recreational diving is purely for enjoyment and has several specialisations and technical disciplines to provide more scope for varied activities for which specialist training can be offered, such as cave diving, wreck diving, ice diving and deep diving. Several underwater sports are available for exercise and competition.
Professional diving is underwater diving where the divers are paid for their work. Occupational diving has a similar meaning and applications. The procedures are often regulated by legislation and codes of practice as it is an inherently hazardous occupation and the diver works as a member of a team. Due to the dangerous nature of some professional diving operations, specialized equipment such as an on-site hyperbaric chamber and diver-to-surface communication system is often required by law, and the mode of diving for some applications may be regulated.
Police diving is a branch of professional diving carried out by police services. Police divers are usually professional police officers, and may either be employed full-time as divers or as general water police officers, or be volunteers who usually serve in other units but are called in if their diving services are required.
The Colonial Parkway murders were the serial murders of at least eight people in the U.S. state of Virginia between 1986 and 1989. The killings were associated with the Colonial Parkway, a 22-mile long thoroughfare that cuts through the Colonial National Historical Park and connects Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown. Long stretches of the road are devoid of any streetlights and are extremely isolated, making it a popular lovers' lane location frequented by young adults.
The Doe Network is a non-profit organization of volunteers who work with law enforcement to connect missing persons cases with John/Jane Doe cases. They maintain a website about cold cases and unidentified persons, and work to match these with missing persons.
Underwater diving, as a human activity, is the practice of descending below the water's surface to interact with the environment. It is also often referred to as diving, an ambiguous term with several possible meanings, depending on context. Immersion in water and exposure to high ambient pressure have physiological effects that limit the depths and duration possible in ambient pressure diving. Humans are not physiologically and anatomically well-adapted to the environmental conditions of diving, and various equipment has been developed to extend the depth and duration of human dives, and allow different types of work to be done.
Jennifer Joyce Kesse is an American woman from Orlando, Florida, who has been missing since January 23, 2006. Shortly after she vanished, Kesse's car was discovered parked around a mile from her home. Security footage recorded her kidnapper parking Kesse's car and walking away, but he could not be identified due to poor camera quality and the absence of any visible distinguishing physical features. The case received local and national press attention.
Vortex Spring is a commercially operated recreation, camping and dive park located near Ponce de Leon, Florida. It is the largest diving facility in the state of Florida.
Recreational dive sites are specific places that recreational scuba divers go to enjoy the underwater environment or for training purposes. They include technical diving sites beyond the range generally accepted for recreational diving. In this context all diving done for recreational purposes is included. Professional diving tends to be done where the job is, and with the exception of diver training and leading groups of recreational divers, does not generally occur at specific sites chosen for their easy access, pleasant conditions or interesting features.
Diver training is the set of processes through which a person learns the necessary and desirable skills to safely dive underwater within the scope of the diver training standard relevant to the specific training programme. Most diver training follows procedures and schedules laid down in the associated training standard, in a formal training programme, and includes relevant foundational knowledge of the underlying theory, including some basic physics, physiology and environmental information, practical skills training in the selection and safe use of the associated equipment in the specified underwater environment, and assessment of the required skills and knowledge deemed necessary by the certification agency to allow the newly certified diver to dive within the specified range of conditions at an acceptable level of risk. Recognition of prior learning is allowed in some training standards.
The Texas Killing Fields is a title used to roughly denote the area surrounding the Interstate Highway 45 corridor southeast of Houston, where since the early 1970s, more than 30 bodies have been found, and specifically to a 25-acre patch of land in League City, Texas where four women were found between 1983 and 1991. The bodies along the corridor were mainly of girls or young women. Furthermore, many additional young girls have disappeared from this area who are still missing. Most of the victims were aged between 12 and 25 years. Some shared similar physical features, such as similar hairstyles.
Susan "Suzy" Poupart was a Native-American woman who disappeared in May 1990. Her body was discovered six months later. The murder currently remains unsolved, although a man was taken in for questioning for her death in 2007. Additionally, another pair of men are under suspicion.
Alisha Ann Heinrich, previously known as "Baby Jane" and "Delta Dawn", was a formerly unidentified American child murder victim whose body was found in Moss Point, Mississippi, in December 1982. The child — aged approximately 18 months — was partially smothered before she was thrown alive from the eastbound Interstate 10 bridge into the Escatawpa River, where she ultimately drowned. Her body was recovered between 36 and 48 hours after her death.
Paige Marie Renkoski was a substitute schoolteacher from Okemos, Michigan who disappeared on May 24, 1990. She was last seen talking to two men on the shoulder of Interstate 96 near Fowlerville, Michigan. Her disappearance is one of Michigan's longest running cold cases. Her vehicle was reported abandoned on I-96, and though the responding officer discovered her car was still running and both her purse and shoes were in the vehicle, the police did not process this as suspicious, but merely had the vehicle towed.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to underwater diving:
The following index is provided as an overview of and topical guide to underwater diving: Links to articles and redirects to sections of articles which provide information on each topic are listed with a short description of the topic. When there is more than one article with information on a topic, the most relevant is usually listed, and it may be cross-linked to further information from the linked page or section.
Edward Pope Andrews and Stephania Rynak Andrews were a married couple who disappeared in 1970 after leaving a party in downtown Chicago. The couple and their vehicle were last seen in the vicinity of the Michigan Avenue Bridge near the Chicago Loop. The case was widely publicized by local newspapers and multiple theories have emerged as to the couple's fate. The whereabouts of their car and themselves has never been discovered, and the case has long gone cold.
Erin Foster and Jeremy Bechtel were two American teenagers from Sparta, Tennessee, who disappeared in April 2000. Their remains were eventually found in Foster's submerged vehicle in the Calfkiller River in 2021 by Jeremy Sides, a volunteer civilian cold-case investigator and YouTuber.
Jeremy Beau Sides, aka "Nug" from the YouTube channel Exploring with Nug, is an American scuba diver and civilian crime investigator who investigates missing person cases and missing items. In 2021, he found the bodies of Erin Foster and Jeremy Bechtel, who had been missing for 21 years.
Joshua Guimond is an American man who disappeared on the night of November 9 and 10, 2002, after leaving a party hosted in a dormitory of Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. He was a 20-year-old junior student at Saint John's, who was partying with friends in the campus' Metten Court dormitory building. He left the party around 11:45 p.m. on the 9th without saying anything. When he did not return, the students at the party assumed that he had gone to sleep elsewhere. The walk to his dormitory, St. Maur, would have taken about three minutes. He was last seen around 12:15 to 12:30 a.m. on the 10th, on a bridge near Stumpf Lake, which is located in between the two buildings.