A kayaker’s iPhone was found 33 days after going overboard off Waikiki beach but still worked after a diver pulled it from the ocean bottom.
On Zach Siggelkow’s last day of vacation, he encountered some waves while kayaking, causing him to tip and lose hold of his phone. Siggelkow recounted, “You can see a bigger wave come and I’m like in my head like, ‘Ohhh! Here we go!’ And then you kind of tip over it. At that point, I was like trying to scramble to find my paddle, but I had my phone in my hand, too.” He made a phoneless return to his home state of Minnesota the following day.
Over one month later, retired fisheries scientist, Dr. Karl Brookins was diving off Waikiki where he spotted something unusual. “The bottom is, you know, pretty uniform out there and sandy with some rocks,” Dr. Brookins said. “And it’s like, that’s a square thing! And there was a pair of sunglasses sitting right next to it.”
“I didn’t expect this one to come back on because it was it was starting to get too crusty.”
In a long-shot attempt, Brookins proceeded with the ‘bag of rice’ technique to extract the moisture and plugged it in one week later to see if it would charge.
“Charged it up and turned it on,” Dr. Brookins said, “and there it said, December 21st! I found it on January 23rd.”
iPhone 14 models can be submerged at a maximum depth of six meters for up to 30 minutes, according to Apple’s website. While the ocean water Siggelkow lost his phone in was roughly four to five feet in depth, the iPhone stayed submerged for 33 days.
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