Some people see the Lehigh River as a backdrop for kayaking or tubing. Brothers Matt and Chris see it as something else entirely: a frontier of secrets.
Armed with scuba tanks, GoPros and an appetite for risk, the Allentown pair plunge into dark, fast-moving waters across the Lehigh Valley to search for the forgotten.
“It started with snorkeling,” Matt said. “But we got too curious. We realized we were being reckless, so we grabbed tanks. More than safety, it was, ‘What’s down there that nobody else can see?’”
The brothers, who began diving in 2017, said they have found items of local legend. They have pulled up everything from drones and phones to iron cauldrons filled with coins, jars of strange substances and the occasional five-foot fish. Each dive becomes a high-stakes puzzle of preparing, descending, then surfacing with proof of what they witnessed.
“To hit the Allentown Trestle, it took me three years of investigation,” Chris said. “We check if the current picks up, how deep it goes, whether there’s rebar we could get caught on. We ask, is there a subterranean river, whirlpools, discharges? All of that could kill us. We approach it rock by rock, inch by inch.”
A dive that produces a 10-minute video might represent a week of planning, hours underwater and nearly 30 hours of editing. Most dives last up to two hours, but what the brothers encounter in that time ranges from dangerous to surreal.
“One time we opened a sealed jar,” Chris recalled. “It smelled like perfume mixed with something worse, and inside was a photo and a sock. Another time we brought up a cauldron packed with Eisenhower dollars and little metal tools. You don’t know if it’s ritual, voodoo — you just get chills handling it.”
The brothers, who go by Stillfin and Stiffchin online, share their finds on YouTube and Facebook. They said the community didn’t know what to make of them at first. Now, their videos rack up thousands of views, with fans calling them the “Lehigh Valley super diving guys.”
Their reputation isn’t just about spectacle. They haul out trash, cut tangled fish loose from hooks and return lost property. One man in Florida got three hours of Caribbean vacation footage back after the brothers tracked him down from an SD card inside his drone.
“I called him and said, ‘We found your drone,’” Matt said. “He thought he’d never see it again. He remembered hearing it hit the bridge and just … gone.”
The risks are real: unpredictable currents, submerged debris and whirlpools. But to them, that’s the point.
“Imagine being someone who wanted to be an astronaut but didn’t get the chance,” Chris said. “This is like that. We’re able to go to places nobody else can reach. That’s what keeps us diving.”