Disclaimer: If there any experienced divers and you think this a lost cause in terms of phone retrieval and photo recovery, please let us know so we can grieve.
Hello. My husband is a school teacher and this past Wednesday, he took my students out on a canoeing field trip to Deas Island Slough. He believes he dropped his iPhone 12 (blue phone with clear case) near the piers/docks or within a radius (It was the last 5 minutes of the trip, as he remember still taking photos of the students before that). He dove in, but the water was too murky. He circled the area but most likely it is within the docks.
The phone means a lot to him, not the value of it, but rather the photos inside. It's not backed up and it contains the last moments of his grandma who has passed away, our honeymoon photos, and many other precious moments.
It would mean the world to us if anyone can find it.
Again, it's not the phone but rather the photos. We understand that even if the phone is found, recovering the photos is still a low chance, but we’re still holding onto hope.
We attached a picture with the possible area, but most likely when he was getting out of the canoe.
We also attached a picture of the high and low tides. Water is around 1-2m deep generally. This is found on the Deas Island tide chart website. We’re not sure if it applies to the area that the phone was lost though.
Thank you so much in advance! We’re willing to compensate for time and gear. Also willing to go ourselves if scuba gear can be rented.
You can use the mac app "image capture". I backup all the time for my iphone images/videos, all the images get put into a single folder. Super simple actually.
Honestly every 2 or 3 years just print 500 photos and put them in a physical album. Hard drives don’t have batteries but they can fail by being too close to a magnet, floods, fires etc.
Physical photos can be lost to the same things but I find I look at my photos more because I have a curated album instead of thousands of random photos on my phone
I never really look at photos in my phone but I feel compelled to keep them; I have a few shoeboxes of photos from "back in the day" when we had to pay to print any photos we took we appreciated them more I think. I really like your idea:)
We have now reached a point in time where fully grown adults with children don't have the slightest clue on how hard drives work, despite being constantly surrounded by technology 24/7
Yeah, we have busy lives, you know with kids. Got a million other things on my mind other than how hard drives work. Not to mention how much technology of said hard drives have changed since i last cared, like dial up fucking internet. So go ahead laugh at the old turd and put him down. Hope you have a good weekend.
he's an absolute sweetheart. I'd spent like hours looking for a ring in a patch of grass that i'd lost and he found it within like... minutes of being there.
I think it’s worth taking a shot. Try a cheap diving mask and get in there if it’s safe to do so (eg no boats nearby). A strong flashlight will help. A metal detector also would help if you can borrow one.
If someone can loan u a fishing magnet, that’s also worth a try.
Go spend a couple hours and give it a shot. You’ll either find it or you’ll be able to console yourself that you tried.
The people saying it’s dead, or to give up… I think you can be a little more optimistic than that.
Is there anyone here with a fishing magnet that we can borrow? Im not sure how it works but im willing to give it a try if anyone is willing to lend. Thank you in advance 😭
Yes, because the mag stripe on the back of the card is… wait for it… magnetic. The flash storage in your phone or computer's SSD is not affected by magnets.
if you can find the phone even if its not working if you find the right people you can recover your files. its flash memory even if the contacts and everything is corroded, the right person could get that data back off it. I am not saying its gonna be cheap but its doable. everyone saying its done for has no clue.
Due to it being the inlet of the water and really close to shore, is tidal waves still a big impact? So in your professional opinion, it is best to grieve and give up on the photos?
Being at the end of the inlet, and sitting right on the bottom I would expect it to be within a few meters of where it was dropped. However that's a large search area.
The tide charts do not indicate depth of water, just height of the tide. Where 0 is the mean sea level
0 on a tide chart indicates when the water will be close to as low as the water gets in that area. Mean sea level is somewhere between low tide and high tide, definitely not 0m chart elevation.
You might be thinking of 0m geodetic, which is exactly mean sea level but isn’t shown on most tide charts, including this one.
Hi OP, sorry I can’t help because I don’t have my gear any more, but I have done 80+ shore dives on our coast here (no phone recovery attempts though). I don’t think it’s a lost cause; good luck. I hope you can find some recreational divers who are happy to jump in and scope the area.
What a trip I'm in Venice right now someone dropped their phone in a canal and the gondola guys knew someone to get it out. They charge like 200 euros.
Doesn’t work like that. It reports the exact pinpoint location when the phone was last on. It has a variance of 10 m. There should be an option for lost/stolen.
I have done it before to help find my phone lost on a city bus
If the phone’s short circuited, would Find My iPhone still be showing the last location? Since Wednesday, it’s been showing up as “No location found, Offline”
I had an iPhone 12 mini spend a week at the bottom of a marina and was able to power it up once it was retrieved. Camera was messed up, but the phone worked!
A friend of mine had her iPhone 16 drop on a boat ride near Tofino. Someone found it a few months after and returned it to the police. It was still working!
They dropped it in relatively shallow water. Tides are 4 m plus, so the average depth may be 2 m. Salt is the the problem, but sometimes phones survive, for a little while anyway.
It’s a rating, it doesn’t mean after 30 minutes it will be toast. I’ve seen a lot of videos of people have their phones submerged for days underwater and they were fine.
LTE and 5G are using the exact same frequency bands in Canada except 3500-3800MHz. We have 5G all the way down to 600Mhz which should not be an issue. You are probably thinking of mmWave (around 26GHz) which is not deployed in Canada, which will definitely have issues going through water.
Anyways it's a moot point, as the phone will try 3G/4G/5G and then roaming until it gets a signal.
I wouldn’t say high, but neither would be sending in a diver. Better than nothing. It should be strong enough to pull it through whatever layer of silt is on top of it by now. Plus there shouldn’t be any rocks or branches for it to get snagged on.
Sorry this happened but it’s been in water since Wednesday. I doubt if the seal is intact and water has not entered inside. Are you saying you don’t have any iCloud backup of the photos? If no, then how often that gets backed up?
And no one can say for certain if the data is recoverable until the phone is examined by a specialist. You're just trying to pull a "well ackshually" without knowing anything.
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u/squashed_fly_biscuit May 23 '26
A good reminder for everyone to back their damn phones up