VANCOUVER — When their raft flipped and threw its three occupants into the Coquitlam River last July, the kids were battered a bit by the turbulence and rocks, but they were OK.
Shaken, but OK. The phone that slipped out of Hunter Hoffman’s pocket during the confusion and a backpack of belongings that also floated downstream were losses, but manageable ones given the circumstances.
“We were on rapids about 10 minutes from Lions Park and the dinghy flipped,” recalled 16-year-old Hunter, the youngest of eight children in the Hoffman family. His young niece and a buddy of his were also thrown into the water.
“I missed my contact information the most,” Hunter said of the phone he thought he had lost forever.
The iPhone 7 Plus was inside a watertight case so the family returned to look for it, albeit with almost no hope. After scouring the area downstream, they gave up.
On Saturday, eight months after it went missing, Hunter’s mom Angela received a text from Mayne Island saying the phone had washed ashore in Piggott Bay, where the current comes down Navy Channel and sometimes swirls around the bay.
Patti Bacchus had been beachcombing off her front yard, doing her almost daily cleanup of the debris that washes onto the beach outside the home she shares with her husband, Lee. She found a Frisbee, a $20 bill in great shape, lots of plastic junk … and Hunter’s iPhone.
“I posted about it [on Twitter] and thought, ‘Wow, people really like a lost-and-found story,’ I got so much reaction,” Bacchus said.
It took a bit of work prying the case open with a screwdriver and after an agonizingly long time the phone began to accept a charge. The screen was locked, but Lee suggested she try 1-2-3-4-5-6 and voila, she was in.
It took a few more seconds to locate a contact labelled ‘Mom’ and get in touch.
How it found its way from the Coquitlam River to the front of her house has Bacchus scratching her head, because their place is on the far side of Mayne.
The phone either floated on the strong current through Active Pass, then made a sharp left to head south; bobbed along the open sea and made it to the Bacchus’s place after rounding Saturna and turning north; or it somehow snaked its way around the Belle Chain Islets and Samuel Island, between Mayne and Saturna.
“It’s bizarre how it travelled so far, and there’s not even damage to the phone,” Angela Hoffman said. “We got this call from a stranger who said, ‘I think we have your phone,’ and I was like, ‘Who are you, what do you want from us?’ because it’s so hard to trust people nowadays.”
It took a photo of the found phone to convince Hoffman this wasn’t someone’s idea of a joke.
“She is just a lovely, lovely lady to chat with, this was so kind of her,” Hoffman said of Bacchus.
Depending on the weather and other factors, Active Pass was the likeliest route the phone took to the Bacchus’s beach, said a University of B.C. professor who is an expert on tides and currents.
“The Fraser River tends to push across the strait very hard,” Susan Allen said. “The Fraser River plume probably took it three-quarters of the way across and the rest was a bit of luck.”
It was fun solving a mystery during these monotonous days of pandemic sameness, Bacchus said.
“I’m keeping the $20 and the Frisbee, and I’ll keep picking up garbage off the beach. I think the moral of the story is go clean up a beach and buy a good case for your phone.”
