THE GoPro was encrusted with barnacles when Christian Patteson found it, which suggested a long stint in the shallows, but they had also died, which meant it had probably washed out to sea.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
That June morning on Bennetts beach in Hawks Nest, Mr Patteson brushed off and examined the tide’s kelp-tangled offering, a waterproof digital motion camera.
Which had to be completely dead in its present, waterlogged state. Right?
Or, in its memory, was there lodged the kind of footage one might stow in a digital message-in-a-bottle?
“It was a while before I opened it up,” Mr Patteson, of Hawks Nest, said.
“Someone took the [Secure Digital] card out for me. I washed it out with fresh water and, lo and behold, it worked.”
The memory card contained footage of a group – male, teenage-looking – bobbing in bright green sea kayaks off Fingal Bay, south of where Mr Patteson had found the GoPro.
The video was dated July 2012. Mr Patteson picked up the boys’ first names from their conversations on the water.
Then, in the video, the sky and sea darkened. The wind picked up. The wearable camera’s fate was foreshadowed as, in the seat of his kayak, its bearer readied himself to catch a wave.
Mr Patteson watched as, four years earlier, the kayaker’s mates egged him on – “go, go, go!”
Kayak, rider and camera jerked under white water and, in a rush of bubbles, the GoPro sank to the sandy floor.
“Then it filmed the bottom of the ocean for two hours,” Mr Patteson said.
“No sharks came along, or anything.”
Mr Patteson decided to find the owner of the GoPro. He felt he had to. He’d long been fascinated by messages in bottles and this was more than that, a messenger from the past with clues to its sender.
The keen beachcomber had never seen the point of Facebook, but put the word out on the social network.
His message was shared more than 300 times and, on October 17, Mr Patteson heard from the GoPro’s owner Liam Brunelli-Brondex in Sydney.
“This is incredible. This is actually my GoPro.”
The GoPro’s owner and its finder spent an afternoon spooling through the four-year-old footage.
Mr Brunelli-Brondex said he found it “very weird”, and overwhelming to have his camera back.
The GoPro had been an 18th birthday gift, and he had swum for hours in the cold water looking for it before his mates pulled him out.
“He was in a state of disbelief about it all, like it was something he’d forgotten,” Mr Patteson said.
“I didn’t want anything for it, but he gave me a bottle of wine.”
