A stranger got in touch with a man who had lost his iPhone 14 to give him the news that his iPhone was working perfectly fine. The man had lost his iPhone 14 while kayaking in Hawaii and was shocked to receive the email.
The man named Zach Siggelkow of St. Anthony Village, Minnesota is 27 years old and was on vacation at Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, with his mother and sister last December. He planned to go kayaking and his mother warned him against it. Unfortunately for him, it was then that the disaster struck.
While on the kayak, some Air Force planes flew over him and he took his iPhone 14 out to film them. It was then that a big wave, which he did not anticipate, hit the side of the kayak. The kayak thus overturned and, at that moment, he only just struggled to find his paddle and got back onto the kayak. A few seconds later, he realized that he had lost both his iPhone and his sunglasses.
He was pretty devastated but realized that there isn’t much he could do about it hence he just moved on with his life. He was surprised to hear the good news via email by the kind person who claimed that he had found his iPhone at the bottom of the ocean.
Dr Karl Brookins, the person who found the smartphone is a retired fisheries scientist who occasionally dives around Waikiki Beach. On one such venture, he noticed something unusual on the ocean floor and discovered the iPhone Siggelkow had lost.
“The bottom is, you know, pretty uniform out there and sandy with some rocks, and it’s like, that’s a square thing!” Brooking recalled. “I didn’t expect this one to come back on because it was it was starting to get too crusty.”
He didn’t have much hope in bringing the iPhone back to life but he placed it in a bag of salt and rice to get rid of the moisture for a week. To his surprise, the phone started charging and eventually powered on as if virtually nothing had happened.
The date on the iPhone was stuck at December 21, the day it had been lost, but everything else was completely fine. Dr. Brookins found the email of the owner and contacted him about returning it.
“I was in shock,” Zach Siggelkow said. “One, that he found it, obviously, two, that he was able to log in to the phone, recover the video and find my email address.”
Dr. Brookins had to unlock the iPhone to find the owner’s email but he admitted that it wasn’t hard to do as it was just a series of 1s.
It’s amazing to see iPhone surviving underwater for 33 days whereas Apple only claims that the iPhone 14 can survive up to 6 meters underwater for 30 minutes.