A diver recovered an iPhone 11 from the bottom of a lake in British Columbia, one that could survive nearly 6 months underwater.
Chilliwack freedivers Clayton Helkenberg and wife Heather have a hobby of diving to the bottom of lakes to find lost property and garbage. In a video released Thursday, he revealed that he had discovered an iPhone at the bottom of Harrison Lake.
When she discovered the lakebed, Heather spotted the iPhone under sediment while Clayton found a scrolling phone. CBC. While Clayton’s find was badly damaged, Heather’s iPhone discovery was in much better condition.
“I took it home, cleaned the dirt out of it and it just turned on right, so it was pretty amazing,” Clayton said. Aside from a broken issue with the microphone and speakers, the iPhone came out largely intact.
After the SIM was thrown out and placed in another device to contact the original owner, it was returned to Fatemeh Ghodsi, a resident of Vancouver. The iPhone was apparently dropped during a boat trip in September and contains photos of Ghodsi just before the fall.
“I was in a situation where I lost balance and fell into the water,” Ghodsi said. Staff at the park 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.
Upon receiving a text message from her old number, the owner of the iPhone thought it was friends who were looting her, but was later persuaded to visit Chilliwack to locate her smartphone.
“I was completely shocked, initially to begin with,” she continued. “It was like a zombie phone coming back to me because I would be completely at peace with it being gone.”
The water resistance of iPhones has led to numerous other reports over the years, where iPhones fall into water bodies and are later detected.
In February 2020, Disney officials returned an iPhone to the owner after divers retrieved it from the Seven Seas Lagoon two months after it was dropped off. A year later, in February 2021, a man jumps into Victoria Inner Harbor in British Columbia to retrieve his iPhone XS from the freezing water.