A diver has recovered an iPhone 11 at the bottom of a lake in British Columbia, one that managed to stay underwater for nearly 6 months.
Chilliwack-free divers Clayton Helkenberg and his wife Heather have a hobby of diving to the bottom of lakes to find lost items and clean up trash. In a video released Thursday, he revealed he discovered an iPhone at the bottom of Harrison Lake.
While exploring the bottom of the lake, Heather saw the iPhone in the sediment, while Clayton found a flip phone, reports CBCAlthough Clayton’s find was badly damaged, Heather’s iPhone discovery was in much better shape.
“I took it home, wiped the dirt off and it just turned on, so it was pretty amazing,” Clayton said. Aside from a broken microphone and speaker issues, the iPhone came out of the ordeal largely unscathed.
After the SIM card was removed and inserted into another device to contact its original owner, it was returned to Vancouver resident Fatemeh Ghodsi. The iPhone was reportedly dropped on a boat trip in September and contained photos of Ghodsi just before the fall.
“I was in a situation where I lost my balance a little bit and dropped it in the water,” Ghodsi said. Park employees told her it was impossible to find the iPhone in the water, forcing Ghodsi to leave empty-handed.
Ghodsi later replaced the iPhone with another mobile device.
When the owner of the iPhone received a text message from her old number, she thought it was friends who were making fun of her, but was later convinced to visit Chilliwack to pick up her smartphone.
“I was in shock at first,” she continued. “It was kind of a zombie phone that came back to me because I would be completely at peace with it when it was gone.”
The water resistance of iPhones has led to numerous other reports over the years, with iPhones being dropped in bodies of water and picked up at a later date.
In February 2020, Disney officials returned an iPhone to its owner after divers picked it up from the Seven Seas Lagoon two months after it was dropped off. A year later, in February 2021, a man in Victoria Inner Harvour, British Columbia, jumped to get his iPhone XS out of the icy water.