Toronto magnet fishers pull five long guns from Lake Ontario

TORONTO -

Known as the "Sludge Pirates", a pair of Toronto friends have found plenty of items sunken below the waters around the GTA.

It's a unique hobby, found by Evan Sabba while scrolling through YouTube — magnet fishing. After a call to his close friend Neil Girvan, it wasn't long before the pair were trolling the waters around the GTA, though they admit most of what they find is garbage.

"Throughout the garbage we found really cool old knives" Girvan told CTV News Toronto.

"We found like really old beer cans like 50, 60 year old beer cans. We found a safe in the Don River."

The pair are both actors, and with lots of free time on their hands during the pandemic, they discovered magnet fishing while scrolling through YouTube. A short time later, they were buying the supplies and heading for the water.

"The magnets we use are 2600 lbs, so they can pull 1300 lbs on either side — they're double sided," Girvan told said, standing on the pier at the foot of Spadina Ave.

"We take that and we throw that into places like this and see what we can find out of the water."

They've taken to filming their underwater explorations, and started a YouTube channel where they've dubbed themselves "Sludge Pirates."

According to Sabba, "you have no idea. Sometimes you pull out these things, you have no idea what they are. But you kinda just think 'Everything's got a story.'"

On a recent trip to the shore of Lake Ontario at the foot of Spadina, the pair found their most interesting story yet.

"What's that?" asked Sabba in a recently posted video. "That's a gun," replied Girvan.

The video shows the pair hauling out the barrel of a long gun.

"We thought at first it was just a bent over piece of rebar," Girvan said, "because our brains wouldn't allow us to think it was a gun."

An intriguing find, but as the pair was soon to discover, it was just the beginning. Moments later, they pulled a second gun out of the water — this one appearing fully intact, though covered in Zebra mussels.

"That's where we thought it ended. We thought it ended with just the two items," Sabba said. "We were really excited but then Neil threw his magnet in again and connected with another gun."

The pair pulled out a third, then a fourth, and then a fifth. All long guns, all old, and all appearing to have been in the water for some time.

The unusual find, all captured on video, also attracted some attention on that day. The Toronto Police Marine Unit arrived to question the two men.

According to Girvan, "They asked us 'You didn't happen to catch any rifles, did you?' and we said, 'Yes, officers, we did catch some rifles' and they asked if they could see them, so we showed the rifles to the police and they said that their switchboard kinda lit up, which we didn't know, we were so caught up in catching the rifles — I guess a bunch of people had called the police on us."

The guns remain in the possession of Toronto Police, who are working to determine if they were involved in any crimes. If not, they could be returned to the pair who found them.

As for the Sludge Pirates, they say they may expand their treasure hunting explorations to involve things like metal detecting. And Sabba says they'd also like to expand the area they explore as well.

"People have really enjoyed the fact that we've been all over Toronto, but filming it because people really like seeing Toronto, especially all of the places we've gone to. So we want to do the same thing for the rest of Canada. There's a lot of amazing cities here. We'd like to visit them, lots of water, clean up the rivers and find some cool things."