Fatemeh Ghodsi was initially skeptical when she received a text message from someone saying they had found her phone almost six months after she lost it in Harrison Lake.
Ghodsi, who lives in Vancouver, was confused and thought that one of her friends might be playing a joke on her. But she was soon convinced and undertook the trip to Chilliwack to pick up the phone, which incredibly still works.
Clayton Helkenberg and his wife Heather found the lost iPhone 11 while sweeping across the bottom of the lake under the water park at Harrison Lake – part of a hobby that finds the strange treasure, but mostly just clears up a lot of garbage.
Ghodsi dropped the phone into the water in early September during a ride with the buffer boats – photos recovered from the phone show how she was still smiling moments before the accident.
“I was in a situation where I lost balance and dropped it into the water,” she said, adding that the water park staff convinced her that it would be impossible to find the phone in the deep water.
“Sad and in tears, we are hopelessly back to Vancouver again,” Ghodsi said.
She quickly bought a new phone and recovered the lost photos, contacts and other personal information that was not backed up.
YouTubing Diver
Helkenberg has been snorkeling, swimming and diving for years, but at the beginning of 2020 – with extra time on his hands after being fired – he made more effort to search for lost objects in the water, as well as to do garbage disposal sessions.
Sometimes he goes diving with friends and his wife. He even started a YouTube channel to document his findings.
Last year, he found more than a hundred sunglasses, 26 cell phones and two GoPro cameras. This year, he has already counted 35 pairs of sunglasses, five phones and one GoPro.
His underwater work even attracted media attention, including a 359-pound report of garbage he and friends retrieved from Cultus Lake earlier this year.
This week he was at Harrison Lake – the water is now much shallower than in summer, and according to Helkenberg it is very clear. He found a badly damaged browsing phone, but Heather Helkenberg noticed Ghodsi’s iPhone.
‘It just turned right’
Clayton Helkenberg said he usually puts phones in a silica container to dry them out, but he was very lucky with the iPhone 11s.
“I took it home, cleaned the dirt from it and it just turned on right, so it was quite amazing,” he said.
He pulls out the SIM card, puts it in another phone to determine the phone number and contacts Ghodsi.
“I was completely shocked, initially to begin with. It was a kind of zombie phone that came back to me because I was completely at peace with its disappearance, ‘she said.
Ghodsi said the microphone is broken and the speaker sounds strange, but all the others are in perfect shape; the battery health is still at 96 percent.
She is grateful for the repair of the phone and inspired that Helkenberg make an effort to reunite people with lost valuable items and not ask for anything in return. But the experience impressed Ghodsi even more with its garbage disposal work, saying it’s a reminder to keep our water clean.
“It gives me so much hope for the good that is there,” she said.
What will happen next on the bumper boats? Ghodsi said she would leave her phone and valuables on the shore, or keep it safely in her pocket.
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