WATCH: Mesmerizing Footage from Video Camera Lost in Coral Reef

When the camera became dislodged from Jens Knof's kitesurf board and sank to the reef bed, he assumed that it was gone for good.

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When Jens Knof lost his friend’s waterproof video camera while kitesurfing back in 2011, he assumed it was gone forever. The realtor had mounted the GoPro camera (the kind that has previously given us a seagull-eye view of San Fransisco Bay and shown us what it’s like to be a trombone) to the front of his board at Kite Beach in Cabarete, Dominican Republic. After the device accidentally became dislodged from the board and sank to the reef bed, Knof optimistically put out an appeal on Facebook in the hope that someone might have found it. And as luck would have it, two-and-a-half months later a spear fisherman came across the camera nestling in the coral and later tracked Knof down.

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After so long, Knof expected the worst when he opened up the waterproof camera’s outer protective casing. “I thought for sure it would be full of water,” he says in the video, which he first posted on YouTube in 2011 but which has only now gained interest online. Amazingly, as Knof demonstrates, the camera itself was completely dry, without a scratch on it. And although, due to its limited battery life and its relatively small-capacity 8gb memory card, the camera sadly didn’t record anywhere near the whole 10 weeks it spent underwater, the video that Knof found when he plugged the memory card into his computer gives us at least a glimpse of the camera’s bumpy, subaquatic journey as it is tossed around by the ocean’s currents and even captures a view of a shoal of fish.

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