The story of a lost Paralenz Dive Camera

8 May 2019

Everybody is familiar with the concept of losing precious objects, whether is jewelry, money, or even electronics. One thing is for sure, no one is ever happy when that happens. And most of the time, you go ahead and replace the said item.

The Paralenz Dive Camera is no stranger to this concept. There are a few cases of lost Paralenz Dive Cameras, and the story behind these unfortunate events gets more interesting with each case. One aspect seems to be common in all these stories that reach our eyes and years, and that is the fact that THE CAMERA STILL WORKS!

The latest case of a lost Paralenz Dive Camera comes from Australia, a place where the diving community is tight and respect each other. They do that to the extent where, if you are unlucky and lose a piece of diving equipment during a dive and someone finds it, you have quite a lot of chances of being reunited with said object. Hard to believe? Read the story below and find out how a diver got his lost Paralenz Dive Camera back.

Owner of the lost Paralenz Dive Camera

Hey guys! So a bit of a story after I purchased one of your cameras at Perth Scuba. I went out diving a lot, loving the camera, until one unfortunate day that I lost it on a cray fishing dive out the back of Rottnest.

Here’s where it gets interesting. I got a phone call the other day as some legend found my camera and through YouTube, and getting in contact with Perth Scuba, I have now been reunited with said lost Paralenz Dive Camera. It spent 4 months getting bashed by the elements off of Perth, and guess what: it still works perfectly! And now, after a bit of cleaning, it’s in the new limited edition Chrome colour.

Anywho shout out to you guys for making such a durable camera. And apart from the ring losing all its markings, this thing is still the worlds #1 action video camera. Mark Barretto is the man who found it and took the time to do this video and get it back to me.

Regards, Rob Girling, A seriously happy diver!

P.S.: I bought another one fearing I lost the first one forever.

The right thing to do

Perth Scuba, the only dive center in West Australia where you can try out and purchase a Paralenz Dive Camera, got an interesting email from one of their customers, mentioning a lost Paralenz Dive Camera he found on one of his dives. And this is why the diving community in Australia really shines:

Dear Perth Scuba, 
I see you are the only Perth stockist of the Paralenz Action cameras. I was diving at Rottnest and found one of these cameras underwater, it has been under since January 2019. I’m hoping to return it to the owner. I’ve been able to recover footage off the camera together with faces of some of the divers with the owner. By chance would you recognize anyone in this video that may regularly frequent your store?

He had Googled Paralenz in Perth and came up with Perth Scuba as the Paralenz Dealer for WA and so figured that as we had most likely sold the Paralenz camera to the unlucky person who had lost it, we may be able to identify someone on the video footage taken from the camera and hopefully track down the owner.

The finder had sent through the video footage, found on the camera. So we started watching it to see if we could identify anyone. First, we saw a group of divers standing in the shallows about to go for their dive. Unfortunately, we couldn’t recognize the divers in the video as they were all geared up with masks on and regulators in their mouths ready to dive. The next footage showed us a bit more information and ultimately gave us the footage that would lead us to the owner of the lost Paralenz Dive Camera.

The search for the owner

On the 52nd second of the footage, it showed the owner (who was filming from the mask mount), place 2 sides mount cylinders onto a step in the water at one of our local dive sites. The side mount cylinders had rigging kits on them that are only sold by Perth Scuba. The rigging kits were blue which then gave us an angle to go to our point of sale system which lists every sale of every item. But we had sold a few of the blue side mount rigging kits so we needed more information… back to the video… 

We saw that the person also had a pair of Apeks RK3 Scuba fins in YELLOW. So we knew we were looking for a person who had purchased a Paralenz camera, a set of Blue Side mount harnesses and a pair of yellow Apeks RK3 fins… It took about 10 seconds to find the person. We then contacted them through the details we had on file from the equipment purchases and asked if they had recently lost a Paralenz camera… “YES!!!” was the response… followed by “I lost it at Rottnest Island!”

He was very excited! We then contacted the finder and gave the unlucky but now lucky customer’s details to him and the two were reunited! When we asked the finder how they came to contact us and he told us it was because we were the only Paralenz dealers in Western Australia. It was great to see that our advertising was working too 🙂

Decent people and a high-quality product

A great ending to a pretty cool story. It shows that there are some good people out there and for his honesty, we rewarded him with a new SMB (Which apparently he lost his own one retrieving the Paralenz) and an awesome super cool Limited Edition Paralenz T-Shirt and a couple of other goodies for being awesome and for returning the camera to our very happy customer 🙂

The biggest lesson learned here is something that we tell all of our customers to do when they first purchase any type of underwater camera… record – just for a second or two, you facing the camera stating your name, contact phone number and even mention your local dive shop so if you can’t be contacted directly, there is a good chance that you will be found eventually. (not even a bad idea to say that there will be a reward given to the finder of the camera) that way if anyone finds it, they know who it belongs to and they will be more than happy to find you and collect a reward for their honesty.

Great news all round! Well done to everyone involved! It was great to be able to match up the owner and finder and to be able to do it so quickly – of course with the assistance of some pretty damn fine video footage thanks to Paralenz!!!