This working iPhone 11 was fished from a lake after taking 6-month swim

News
By Oliver Haslam
published

Iphone 11 In Lake
Iphone 11 In Lake (Image credit: Clayton Helkenberg)

What you need to know

  • Someone has retrieved a working iPhone 11 from a lake in British Columbia.
  • Despite six months at the bottom of a lake, the iPhone still worked.

Dropping your iPhone into a lake should be the end of the story. If it was my iPhone, the only after-credit clip would be me walking into an Apple Store to buy a new one. But not Fatemeh Ghodsi. After dropping an iPhone 11 into Harrison Lake in British Columbia, Ghodsi went about life for a full six months before receiving a text message saying someone had their iPhone.

And sure enough, they did. Because they'd fished it out of the lake. Oh, and the iPhone worked according to CBC and Apple Insider reports.

Apple Q2 2020

Apple Q2 2020 (Image credit: iMore)

Fatemeh Ghodsi was skeptical at first when she got a text from someone saying they found her phone nearly six months after she lost it in Harrison Lake.Ghodsi, who lives in Vancouver, was confused and thought one of her friends might be playing a prank on her. But she was soon convinced and made the trip to Chilliwack to collect the phone, which amazingly still works.

Clayton Helkenberg and his wife Heather reportedly discovered the lost iPhone when they were having a poke around the lake one day. Because that's a thing people do, apparently. What's more, Helkenberg says the iPhone worked right away.

"I took it home, cleaned the dirt off of it and it just turned right on, so it was pretty amazing," they said. After pulling the SIM card out and putting it into another phone, Helkenberg was able to get in touch with the phone's owner and reunite the pair.

While Apple does say iPhone 11 has is water-resistant to a point, at no point does it say it is waterproof. What's more, even if it was, all bets would be off after six months underwater. Most people won't be this lucky and I'd definitely suggest getting a waterproof bag for your iPhone if you're going near a body of water.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.