A diver has recovered an iPhone 11 from the bottom of a lake in British Columbia, one that managed to survive submerged for nearly 6 months.
Free Chilliwack divers, Clayton Helkenberg and his wife Heather, have a fondness for scuba diving at the bottom of lakes to find lost items and remove trash. In a video posted Thursday, he revealed that he had discovered an iPhone at the bottom of Lake Harrison.
While exploring the lake bed, Heather noticed the iPhone among the sediments, while Clayton found a flip phone, reportedly CBC. Although Clayton’s finding was severely damaged, the discovery of Heather’s iPhone was in much better condition.
“I took it home, cleaned it and turned it on, so it was pretty amazing,” Clayton said. Aside from the broken microphone and speaker problems, the iPhone came out unscathed.
After ejecting the SIM and putting it in another device to contact the original owner, they returned it to Vancouver resident Fatemeh Ghodsi. The iPhone was reportedly launched during a boat ride in September and contained photos of Ghodsi just before the fall.
“I was in a situation where I lost my balance and dropped it into the water,” Ghodsi said. Park staff members told him it was impossible to find the iPhone in the water, forcing Ghodsi to leave empty-handed.
Later, Ghodsi replaced the iPhone with another mobile device.
Upon receiving a text from his old number, the owner of the iPhone thought they were friends joking with him, but was later convinced to visit Chilliwack to retrieve his smartphone.
“I was totally shocked, initially to begin with,” he continued. “It was like a zombie phone was coming back at me, because it would make peace with the disappearance.”
The water resistance of iPhones has led to numerous other reports over the years, where iPhones are dropped into bodies of water and subsequently recovered.
In February 2020, Disney officials returned an iPhone to its owner, after divers picked it up from Seven Seas Lagoon two months after it was abandoned. A year later, in February 2021, a man jumped on Victoria Inner Harbor in British Columbia to retrieve his iPhone XS from icy water.