It’s one thing to lose your phone on the street, in the back of a cab or anywhere on dry land where a good Samaritan might come by and decide to help find its owner. But after one guy watched his phone sink to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean back in March, he figured that thing was gone for good. Enter: scuba divers going for a swim who just happened to find his device in the waterproof bag it had sunk in.

That waterproof bag turned out to be the key to getting his phone back — obviously, if the phone had been water damaged, it’s unlikely its rescuers would’ve been able to turn it on and connect with the owner.

Imgur user ehtnaerokyug posted his story this week of the prodigal iPhone 6 Plus he took with him on a kayaking trip in Monterey Bay back in March. He’d purchased a waterproof bag just for the trip, and took photos with the case hanging around his neck.

At some point, he fell into the water, and panicked when his foot got caught in the seaweed. Despite the scare, he made it back onto the boat, only to fall again. That’s when the iPhone slipped away.

“I pulled myself back onto my boat and I heard something snap but thought it was my life vest,” he writes in the description. After he got back to the shore he removed his life vest and realized the iPhone had slipped away in the water, likely never to be seen again. He put the phone in lost mode, logging in to the “Find My iPhone” app for a week before giving up.

Fast forward to early May, when he gets a notification that his phone had been turned on.

“It turns out the person who found my phone tried to put their number but I declined through my notification on my new iPhone (the replacement) and contacted the person,” he writes, adding that at first he came off as a jerk because he wanted his phone back, and someone else had it. But the finders arranged to meet with him and hand it over.

When he got to the meeting spot, he found his phone was in the same waterproof bag, and worked perfectly fine, with no water damage. The iPhone’s saviors? A couple who’d also been in Monterey Bay to go kayaking and scuba diving.

“They found the phone in the bottom of the ocean near a rock still in the pouch. I was baffled. I had no words to explain my feelings,” he wrote. “I didn’t know what to say or do. I couldn’t have thanked them enough.”

The lessons here? Don’t go kayaking without a waterproof case for your phone… and there are decent humans out there.

“There’s amazing people out there who are willing give back your possession if you’re nice and not a jerk to them,” the happy guy noted.

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