Lost at sea

Imagine you lost your phone seven hundred kilometres from home on an isolated beach reachable only by sea? What do you reckon your chances of getting it back would be? In Greenland, they seem to be better than you would think.

The other week, my husband was working in a field camp in Disko Bay, in central west Greenland. He was walking on a white sand beach, miles from anywhere, when he saw something black lying just at the high tide line. A mobile phone. Picking it up, it appeared undamaged. He switched it on, but it almost immediately switched off again, running close to empty on battery power. So he put it in his pocket, thinking he would try to find its owner once he returned to town in a few days.

Almost a week later, about a hundred kilometres away back in Ilulisat, he charged it and switched it on, but there was a pin code for the sim card so he couldn’t get into it. He took it to Telepost, who were able to find the name of the owner from the serial number. There was also an address back in Nuuk – over five hundred kilometres away – but only a street address, which wouldn’t make it easy to pin down the owner.

With a name to go on, at least, he turned to social media. Surprisingly – for Greenland, which is obsessed with Facebook – he couldn’t find the owner. But he figured that at least he could put up some posters at the supermarket near the street where the owner lived once he returned to Nuuk.

But he decided not to give up there. Instead, he put his own sim card in the phone, allowing him access to the contacts and photos stored on the phone. One of the first contacts in the list was listed as a “skipper” and had the same name as a boat skipper my husband knew. He checked the number against his own contact list. It was the same guy. Checking the photos on the phone, he also found several recent photographs of the boat he knew the man skippered. Could the owner have been working on his ship, he wondered?

Back in Nuuk by now, my husband called up the skipper from the contact list, who was pleased to hear from him and amazed to learn that he’d found the phone belonging to his first mate, who had lost it a couple of weeks earlier. As it happened, the boat was in harbour in Nuuk so my husband went and returned the phone. Finally, my husband discovered that he had, about a year previously, actually met the phone’s owner briefly when he’d had some work on the same boat, but he hadn’t recalled his name.

A phone dropped on the highwater mark of a remote beach, found in an unrelated visit a week later by someone who knows the owner – and returned personally, in working order, seven hundred kilometres away. Greenland might be the world’s largest island (if you disqualify Australia, as it is a continent) but it is feels remarkably small at times.