How to recover your cellphone from the bottom of the lake

This might not be the sort of photo you'd value unless it's your father who died last year and it was on a cellphone that was in your breast pocket and it fell into the water when you were ice fishing the other day and you never got around to backing up what was on the phone.

That's Luc Lemoine's story as told by the CBC. He was ice fishing with his friend Jason Matity when the phone went in the drink.

"My dad passed away in June and I'd gone to see him in May and we'd taken some photos together," Lemoine said. "I wanted those photos back because there was no way I could replace them. And stupid me I hadn't done a backup."

Because Matity does an ice fishing show, there were cameras under water that got a good look at the cellphone. But their plan of just trying to hook it didn't work after hours of trying, the CBC says.

"All we did was kept stirring up mud and muck," Matity said.

So they went all MacGyver:

A couple of days later they were back at the lake with 25 metres of plumbing pipe and two giant ladles.

"We were definitely part MacGyver, part Red Green because we were using a lot of duct tape," Lemoine said.

They had taped a camera to the pipe.

The rescue mission did not start well. Their early attempts at scooping up the phone ended up burying it in the silt.

It took them six hours, but they were finally able to retrieve the phone.

After putting the cellphone in rice to dry it out, all the pictures on it were mostly intact.

The first thing Lemoine did was back up his files.

Then they made a video to show others how to rescue a camera dropped in the lake while ice fishing.

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