Last week, YouTube user Francis Darracott uploaded an unusual video to his account: It showed the strange and solitary underwater adventure of a lost GoPro camera, found by Darracott’s sister while fishing on a lake near the UK town of Hamworthy.
GoPros are designed to record “extreme” outdoor activities like skiing, diving, skydiving or jumping off a cliff. Naturally, the rugged little cameras can end up lost or in accidents. And if the camera keeps recording, footage of what happens next can be surprising, once recovered.
In the video below, picked up by PetaPixel, Darracott introduces the found footage with photographs of his fishing trip and the broken remains of the found GoPro. Luckily, the SD card was still intact, and the next scenes show the recovered GoPro’s record of a young women standing on a jetty, a few kayakers in the background. After a tumble into the water, the camera appears to detach from its owner and start to sink. It continues to record some 30 minutes after touching bottom.
Eventually, a new friend steps into the frame……
Darracott says the footage he found was shot on Aug. 13, 2015, and urges anyone who recognizes the woman in the video to contact him.
He’s not the first to have stumbled upon a lost GoPro and posted the footage online in hopes of finding the original owner. Below, enjoy three of the best orphaned GoPro videos on YouTube:
A GoPro’s big adventure
This Sept. 2013 video below, titled “A GoPro’s Big Adventure,” was found by Beau Ouimette from Maryland, who’s made a hobby of treasure-hunting along riverbeds. ”I began searching rivers about 20 years ago after reading a Civil War soldier’s diary where he wrote about watching cannonballs hit a stream bank and roll back into the water making a “hissing” sound,” Ouimette told the Huffington Post this April. “I went to that exact spot and found cannonballs.”
The GoPro he found appears to have fallen into water with its owner during a rafting trip, and footage reveals a tumbling and turning odyssey through the yellow water.
A creepy encounter under the sea
The video below, uploaded Aug. 2013, was lost in the sea about 10 seconds after it started recording a man surfing. It was later found on a California beach. This GoPro recorded about 30 more minutes of tumbling and turning through the waves. If you look carefully, you might see a strange animal appear briefly, just before the time mark hits 17:00.
“I’d like to return the camera—any help locating the owner would be appreciated,” says user Jeffrey Strain on the video page.
A dizzying solo skydive
And in this terrifying video uploaded April 2015, a GoPro appears to fall to certain destruction. But the mushroom hunter who found it outside of Kristianstad, Sweden, extracted its SD card intact. Watch if you have a strong stomach.
This last clip comes with a happy ending: Just one day after it was found, its owner, a local parachutist, got in touch.