If you’ve lost your iPhone by accidentally dropping it in a river, you’d probably think that the phone was gone forever and that you would never see it again. Cue the sad music. In August 2021, iPhone user Owain Davies dropped his handset while in a canoe in the Wye River in Gloucestershire. That might have been the end of the story right there; Davies buys a new iPhone and the lost unit is forgotten.
An Apple iPhone X survives 10 months in a river
An iPhone X is discovered after 10 months in a river and is returned to its rightful owner
The screensaver showed a man wearing sunglasses and holding an ice cream cone. He was standing next to a woman, also wearing sunglasses. The photo was taken on August 14th, the day the device fell into the water. Hey, we never even got around to revealing yet which iPhone model was lost in the river; it was an iPhone X.
After being shared on the local Cinder Noticeboard Facebook group over 4,000 times, some friends of Owain Davies recognized him and his fiancée Fiona Gardner from the photo on the phone’s screensaver. A reunion between the phone and its owner finally took place.
Davies was impressed at the effort made by Mr. Pacheco to return the phone to him and admitted that had the roles been reversed, he probably wouldn’t have gone to such an effort. “My natural reaction would be to hand it into the nearest pub. It wouldn’t be to use my air compressor to dry it out and dismantle it,” he said.
The build quality of the Apple iPhone is among the best in the industry
Well, a miracle was about to happen. First, because of a structural problem with the lake’s dam, it was drained completely which turned the lake into a treasure trove for those willing to get full of mud. One of those people, Daniel Kalgren, took his metal detector with him to the drained lake and found just one item buried under 6 inches of mud and clay: an iPhone 4 still in its OtterBox case.
Pachaco was surprised to find that the phone was working the day after he found it
Kalgren explained what he did next. “I took the phone home, cleaned it, and put it in rice – just out of curiosity to see if it would still work.” Two days later, the phone turned on and Kalgren was able to find Michael Guntrum’s name and phone number listed in the device. At the time, he said that he would get the device fixed up and would give it to his mom who needed a smartphone.
