Waterproof iPhone 4
Published on 2012-03-13 23:26:19
So it appears that the iPhone I found two weeks ago while cleaning the harbor in Avalon is an iPhone 4 and kind of works!
Amazing.
After 12 hours in a bath of isopropyl alcohol and 48 hours buried in rice, it powered but reset continuously. When I opened it, I was amazed by the difference between the inside and the outside. On the outside it looked brand new. In the inside, it looked like it had spent a couple of days in the ocean. Which it did. Rusted everywhere and highly corroded at each connection. I cleaned up the mess as best as I could. The battery looked like it was crumbling so I decided to try to replace it. I ordered one on Amazon for 84 cents and 4 bucks of shipping and installed it. I plugged the phone to my computer and got the Apple logo that I had before but this time the phone did not reset... My heart started racing... After about a minute I still had the damn logo and was losing hope rapidly when suddenly, the unlock screen appeared!
The phone seems operational, except it has no service (of course the sim has probably been disabled), no wifi, the home button works 1% of the time and the camera seems dead.
I've now have a dilemma. Should I jailbreak the phone and keep it for me, or should I try to contact his owner to return it?
Out of normal human curiosity I browsed the stored emails and found out the owner's email address, so it's easy to just drop him an email and have him pick the phone. I figure out my salvation services are well worth two hundred bucks...
At the same time, the phone is full of pictures of giant bull lobsters freshly fished out of the ocean and on the BBQ. Big bull lobsters are necessary for reproduction (they are the alpha males) and are very important for the preservation of the species. Even if it is legal to catch them, divers are encouraged to release them or to donate them to aquariums or research institutes, not to serve them on the BBQ with steak. Other pictures also showed at least half a dozen of big abalones on display. So this guy may have caught them North of the San Francisco Bay as permitted by California law, however I frankly doubt it. In addition, I'm no expert, but they did not really look like red abalones, rather white which are illegal to catch everywhere in California. There are pictures of them on the BBQ too, so they did not end up released for sure...
So by my even low standards, that guy deserves a big slap in the face for poaching rather than his iPhone back... Still... What do you think dear 62 readers?
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User comments
Posted by Thomas
On 2012-03-14 07:09:04
That\'s why I dont participate in the cleanup. It\'s people like that that think they can do what ever they want and couldn\'t care less about the environment. I\'m amazed that you were able to recover it at all, but I think you should repost this article on Scubaboard and send that fool\'s pictured and info to Fish & Game! Great article!Posted by David Jackson
On 2012-03-16 14:02:08
With all the evidence off this individual is poaching, if there was a way,I would turn him in. Then he can call a lawyer on his water logged iphone4Take me back home
