14 DAY TRIAL // iPhones aren’t really the most durable phones, but Michael Guntrum from Knox, Pennsylvania, certainly thinks otherwise, as he found his one year after he lost it when fishing.
Guntrum explains that he lost his iPhone 4 when fishing on a frozen lake in March 2015 when the device slipped off from his lap right into the ice hole.
“We were having negative-25-degree weather, so me and two buddies went ice fishing. We were sitting in our portable shanty, and I got a bite on my rod. I laid the phone on my lap, and it slipped off. Instead of landing flat in the snow, it hit its edge and rolled into the hole. I caught the fish - it was a blue gill - but it wasn’t worth it,” he was quoted as saying by BuzzFeed News.
In September this year, however, the lake was drained because of structural deficiencies and the iPhone was found by a treasure hunter who was using his metal detector in the basin. He says he was there to “find what people dropped off of boats,” but found an iPhone under nearly 6 inches of mud and clay.
The Supercase
He took the device home, cleaned it, left it in rice for a couple of days and plugged it in. The phone was working, so he looked into the contact list to find the owner’s number.
“It was the only thing I found that day. I was able to turn it on and use it to look up his number. He knows I have it now, and I’m going to mail it to him,” the treasure hunter explains.
Guntrum, who purchased an iPhone 6s in the meantime, used a special protection cover on the iPhone and this could be one of the reasons the device lasted for so long in water. Older iPhones are not water resistant, and only the iPhone 7 has an IP67 rating and was specifically designed to withstand certain amounts of liquids.
The fisherman now claims that he’s going to keep the iPhone 4, have it cleaned and then give it to his mother, although we’re pretty sure some repairs will be needed. OK, we know that it turned on and everything, but it’s really impossible for a smartphone that stayed for so long on the bottom of a lake to be in tip-top condition.
