A Vancouver woman’s iPhone came back from the dead this week after a YouTube diving duo discovered her lost device at the bottom of a lake east of the city.
Last September, Fatemeh Ghodsi was enjoying some outdoor time away from the urban sprawl at Harrison Hot Springs, which is about an hour and a half outside of Van. While playing around in bumper boats on Harrison Lake, Ghodsi snapped a selfie to document her day. But she lost the grip of her iPhone 11 mere seconds after taking the pic, and the device went overboard, sinking into the deep depths of the lake.
Ghodsi, while upset, resolved to the fact that her phone’s fate was destined to become one with the water forever. She went back home, bought a new phone, and went on with life.
This week, however, she received a message saying that her phone had been found. At first she thought it was a prank.
“I was in complete shock, initially to start with. It was kind of like a zombie phone coming back to me, because I’d totally made peace with it being gone,” she told CBC.
But the message was real. It had come from long-time diver Clayton Helkenberg and his wife Heather, who’d retrieved the phone during a recent dive at Harrison Lake. The pair, who started a YouTube channel during the pandemic to document all of the lost loot (as well as a shocking amount of garbage) they collect, found two other phones and 11 pairs of sunglasses that same day.
Usually the Helkenbergs put the found electronics into a container of silica to dry them out and get them working again, but Ghodsi’s iPhone 11 turned on like normal, despite having spent the past six months submerged in water.
The iPhone 11 is water resistant and can be submerged up to two metres for half an hour. That’s according to Apple. But Cnet did some hard-hitting investigative journalism last fall and found that this model of the iPhone, as well as the 11 Pro, might be more amphibious than it’s made out to be.
Ghodsi has since been reunited with her phone, though says the microphone and speaker aren’t working like they used to. Still, she’s thankful to have it back.
