After almost four years of being frozen, thawed, flooded and battered, a GoPro camera lost on a Donegal beach has been reunited with its owners.
Harvey Futcher, from Derry , discovered the device while hiking on rocks at Culdaff beach on Sunday. And while the camera was beyond repair, its memory card was in perfect working order.
After viewing the contents, Harvey was able to ascertain that it belonged to a group of surfers who had hit the waves at Culdaff in the summer of 2016.
In a bid to trace the owners, he uploaded the footage to social media. And within two hours someone came forward to identify the three friends.
He explained: “Where I was walking it was quite high up and I spotted the camera under a rock. It was really wedged in and it took me a few minutes to get to it. The lens was damaged but the memory card was intact.
“I put the photos and video on Facebook to see if I could identify the owners and within two and a half hours someone contacted me to say they recognised them. That was the interesting part for me, how quickly the owners were located.”
Incredibly the story of how the camera came to be lost and its under-sea adventure is all captured on film.
Harvey said: “It was obvious they were surfers but something happened because the camera was hanging by someone’s side and it dropped into the water. A wave washed it away and the last 45 minutes of footage is just the camera bouncing along the sea bed. It filmed its own demise really.”
The GoPro has been reunited with surfing pals Declan Divin and David McDaid, from Derry, and Culdaff man Graeme McKeague.
Declan said: “We thought it was a lost cause and that we would never see it again. But then a few days ago people started to tag me on Facebook. I was like 'no way, I thought that thing was gone forever'.
“It's amazing to see the footage after all this time. It's a digital contemporary message in a bottle really.”
Harvey added: “In the crazy world we live in, it’s a nice story, sort of ‘how cool is this’. The response online has been amazing.”
