Fisherman returns camera dropped in ocean after 18 months!

LONDON - A South African couple, who had accidentally dropped their camera into the ocean during a cruise, will be reunited with it after a fisherman caught it in his net and put the photographs online.

Barbara, 53, and Dennis Gregory, 65, from Johannesburg, South Africa, were travelling on the QM2 cruise ship, when the Nikon P90 fell into the ocean en-route from New York to Southampton in 2008.

They thought they would never see it again, but 16 months later Benito Estevez, a fisherman from Spain, found the camera in his nets with the photos still intact on the memory card.

He decided to trace the owners and posted five pictures online, which showed Gregory posing on the deck of the ship and her husband wearing a woolly tourist hat from Oxford.

The story was picked up by the British media and Laura De Klein, a friend of the couple, who lives in Chalgrove, Oxfordshire, and upon recognising them and she got in touch.

“To think the Spanish fishermen has gone to such efforts on this - it’s very touching,” the Telegraph quoted Barbara as saying.

“It’s literally a dream come true. There’s no way we could ever have imagined that this thing would ever turn up again. It sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic.

“It’s incredible it survived 16 months submerged at that depth - I’m almost speechless,” she added. (ANI)