[imagesource:facebook/Coral Elise Amayi]

An Arizona resident who lost her digital camera in the Colorado river 13 years ago was amazed to see her pictures posted to Facebook by a stranger.

Coral Amayi was on a tubing trip down the Animas River with recently married friends when she was flipped out of her tube and into the river. It was only later that she realised her digital camera had been lost in the spill, and as there was little she could do, she wrote it off.

The loss of her camera was made worse by the fact that the memory card still contained most of her pictures from her friends’ wedding, the bridal shower, as well as their subsequent river trip.

As if the loss of those memories weren’t bad enough, the unlucky lady lost another camera in the very same way, when during a second boating trip her oar got stuck on the cord attached to the camera and the little device went sailing into the river, again.

“I was sad about losing that camera, too, because we had just been on a month-long road trip and I had a ton of pictures of the wedding and no computer around to upload to.”

Sometimes these things happen, and over the years Amayi thought about the lost memories the cameras took with it to the bottom of the river.

It seemed like the end of that story until a fisherman named Spencer Greiner hooked onto something while out on the same river years later. Amused with his find, the fisherman took the camera home and after plugging it into his computer, was amazed to find the data on the SD card still retrievable.

To the fisherman’s amazement, the card contained several pictures of a wedding and bridal shower. Greiner immediately knew he had to try and find the owner of the camera, so he turned to Facebook.

He posted several of the pictures on a Durango, Colorado, Facebook group on March 15, and to his even bigger surprise was contacted a few hours later by none other than the groom of the pictured wedding.

“I couldn’t believe that I was able to find someone in the photos so quickly.”

Greiner was contacted a few days later by Amayi and the two quickly realised that they even had mutual friends. What a small world.

The return of her precious memories has inspired Amayi, and she hopes the story of the recovered camera inspires other people to take the extra effort to reunite lost items with their owners.

“Most people would be thrilled to get an old wallet back even if they have already had to get new cards. If more people took time to care for others the world would be a better place.”

It’s amazing that the SD card survived for so long underwater. Perhaps memories and the old cameras have something in common – they don’t make them like they used to.

[source:today]