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A UK man has been reunited with his iPhone after spending 10 months at the bottom of a river – and it still worked when he got it back.
Owain Davies dropped the iPhone in August 2021 in the Wide River near Cinderford, Gloucestershire, the BBC reported. At the time, Davies was canoeing during a bachelor party.
However, the story does not end there. Earlier in June, Miguel Pacheco of Drybook, Gloucestershire, found the device while canoeing in the river. He took it home, dried it out and posted images of it online in an attempt to locate its owner.
Pacheco said he thinks efforts will not do “any good” because the iPhone is “full of water.” However, he still dried because he knew it could have contained sentimental data images.
“I know if I lost my phone, I have a lot of pictures of my kids, I know I will want it back,” he said.
The man dried out the device with an air compressor before placing it in an air box to dry. When he put it on the charger the next morning, the background showed a photo of a man and woman, as well as August 13 – the date the device fell into the water.
“I just could not believe it,” Pacheco said.
Pacheco posted images on Facebook that were shared more than 4,000 times. Eventually, friends of Davies and his fiancée Fiona Gardner recognized the images and contacted them. It was eventually returned to working condition.
Davies also explained BBC how the device fell into the river.
“I was in a two-man canoe and my partner probably should not have gotten up, and needless to say we fell in,” he said. “The phone was in my back pocket and as soon as it was in the water I realized the phone was gone.”
He also told Pacheco that he had made an effort to save the device. “My natural reaction would be to hand it in at the nearest bar. It would not be to use my air compressor to dry it out and take it apart,” he said.
Newer iPhone models are rated IP68 water resistant, which means they can withstand up to 1.5 meters of fresh water for up to 30 minutes.
However, there are many accounts of iPhones that have survived immersion far beyond that.
In March 2021, an iPhone 11 spent six months on the bottom of a lake in Canada and came out relatively unharmed. In August of that year, a report indicated that another iPhone had been reunited with its owner after being underwater for a year.