Handcuffs and padlocks no match for Ex performer

Dean Gunnarson likes to say he's escaped from the RCMP more than anyone else alive, but it's not for the reasons you might expect.

Handcuffs are easy for Gunnarson, an internationally known escape artist, so he has to try a little harder, and in Prince Albert on Tuesday night he tried an escape he had never done before.

First, he was handcuffed and wrapped in chains, with a padlock around his neck. Then, he was dumped in a 208-litre tank of water, with a lid placed on top and chained down, with a padlock on the outside.

"There's no curtains, no smoke, no mirrors. Nothing," he said, relaxing on a set of bleachers at the Prince Albert Exhibition on Tuesday afternoon before his show, with no hint of the danger he was about to put himself in.

Think of how much trouble a high school locker combination lock can cause when you're late for class, said Gunnarson - then pretend you're blind and underwater.

"So, I've got to reach my hand out while I'm underwater, find the combination lock, and then find the numbers with only the feels of my finger, kind of like an old safe-cracker," he said. "Your fingers become your eyes and they have to be really sensitive."

The Winnipeg native has been hung upside down in a straitjacket above 130 alligators in a Florida swamp, above the Hoover dam, and even in a car crusher, and the 46-year-old has been doing so since he was a teenager.

But he also knows what happens when he can't escape.

As a tribute to his idol, Harry Houdini, Gunnarson was once chained up and put in a coffin with the lid nailed shut. Another set of chains was wrapped around before Gunnarson, then 19 years old, was lowered into the icy Red River.

"There were 10,000 people there watching and I didn't get out," he said. "I was under for like four minutes, they pulled the coffin out and I was blue. My face was totally blue - I'd asphyxiated. I was totally dead."

The crew pulled him out and paramedics were able to revive him, but he said the experience gave him a new appreciation for life and for his work.

"Rather than an escape from a coffin, it became an escape from death."

Tuesday night's show - his only one this week - was Gunnarson's first time performing at the Prince Albert Exhibition.