Owen Davies dropped his iPhone XR into the River Wye in the UK during a canoe trip last August. Earlier this month, Miguel Pacheco found the smartphone. He dried the device and it turned out to be working perfectly. Pacheco tracked down the owner who “I can’t believe” he put his iPhone back in business.
At a hen party last August in Sunderford, Gloucestershire, England, Owen Davies from Edinburgh went canoeing on the River Wye. “I was in a two-person boat and my partner shouldn’t stand up. We fell into the water, of course,” Davies explained to the BBC.
Ten months later Miguel Pacheco from Drybrook in Gloucestershire with his daughter went canoeing. He saw “something blue floating in the water”, which turned out to be the iPhone XR. Pacheco took the smartphone home to dry it. “It didn’t look good, it was full of water,” Pacheco said. But he wanted to restart the device for emotional reasons. “I know that if I lose my cell phone with a lot of my kids’ pictures on it, I’ll want to get it back.”
Pacheco used an air compressor to dry the iPhone and left it overnight in a warm shed. He couldn’t believe his eyes when he was able to successfully charge the phone the next morning. The screensaver was a picture of a man with a woman. The date was Friday, August 13, the day the iPhone fell from the man’s pocket into the water.
To find the owner, Pacheco posted the photo on Facebook, where more than 4,000 people shared it. Owen Davis himself has been off social media for six months, but his friends and the friends of his fiancée, Fiona Gardner, have identified the couple.
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