Freedivers return working iPhone 11, dropped in Lake Harrison, with 96% battery and broken microphone

A lucky owner of the iPhone 11 was reunited with her lost smartphone after she had dropped it in Lake  Harrison six months ago. CBC reports that as part of their hobby, Clayton Helkenberg and his wife Heather found the smartphone while sweeping the lake’s bottom.

Six months prior, Fatemeh Ghodsi had accidentally dropped her iPhone 11 in during a bumper boat ride at a water park at Harrison Lake. Therefore, when Helkenberg messaged that he had found her phone, she thought it was a prank. But to her surprise, the lost submerged smartphone was working fine with 96% battery health, a broken microphone, and damaged speakers.

An iPhone 11 retrieved from Harrison Lake after 6 months worked fine

Apple does not market its products as waterproof. The iPhone 11 models are water-resistant to a depth of 2 meters for up to 30 minutes. But sometimes they can surprise everyone by surviving submerging for a much longer period of time. Helkenberg narrates that,

“I took it home, cleaned the dirt off of it and it just turned right on, so it was pretty amazing. He pulled out the SIM card, put it in another phone to figure out the phone number and got in touch with Ghodsi.

Ghodsi shared that she is not only glad to have found her phone but also humbled by Helkenberg goodness.

“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 said.

She’s thankful for the phone’s recovery and inspired that Helkenberg makes the effort to reunite people with lost valuables, asking nothing in return. But the experience has left Ghodsi even more impressed by his trash cleanup work, saying it’s a reminder to keep our water clean.

In a similar water accident, @u/Duritomax discovered that his iPhone 12 Pro Max was functioning fine when retrieved from 30ft deep water, after 18 hours. He wrote, “iPhone left in the lake for 18 hours 30 feet down. (My first time ice fishing) iPhone 12 Pro Max came up and was playing my alarm when we used a hook and camera to snag the MagSafe leather case!”