Unreliable Eyewitnesses

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I was traveling with my family to Key West, and we decided to stop for paddleboarding. We were very excited about that because it was the first time for each of us. After instructions, we got our paddleboards, and the owners also provided us waterproof pockets for our cell phones.

I carefully placed my new cell phone in the bag and sealed it.

The weather was so amazing—a nice sunny day with the right air temperature, and the ocean was peaceful and quiet.

I started “activity” on my smartwatch and climbed up on the paddleboard, trying to keep my balance, and started paddling to the open ocean with a very positive attitude and serious intentions.

Nothing foretold trouble.

And here I slipped from the board and fell into the water, then climbed back and realized that I had lost the bag with the phone.

It was supposed to float on the surface but not in my story; there was nothing around me. The first thing I tried to do was to memorize my position in the open ocean, and I’m going to say it’s almost impossible.

I explained what happened to the owner of the rental shop and asked for a snorkeling mask, and he also offered his help. So my family started looking for the floating bag, and a few minutes later, a man who had been watching from land said that we were looking in the wrong place. He said he had seen everything and could point to the exact place where I lost the phone. Then, sometime later, a guy from the boat said that he also saw how I fell in the water, which was a little bit to the left and farther away.

At that point, I had three different places I was supposed to look for my phone. The ocean wasn’t so deep around two of them, but the third one was around a trench, and I couldn’t see anything down there.

After about an hour of active searching, we were so exhausted and discouraged and almost lost our hope. All members of my “search team” got on the shore, and there was an annoying silence in the air.

But I suddenly got an idea: I had my new smartwatch, and it had probably recorded all my routes from the beginning till the end, with the exact GPS coordinates. In a split second, I was looking on the map and understanding that all we had done was absolutely in the wrong place, and there was still some hope.

The owner of the rental shop and I got back on the boards, and we found the phone very easily. It was at the exact location from the watch recordings, sitting on the bottom of the ocean and waiting for us.

At that happy point, I realized how unreliable eyewitnesses are. From that day, I decided to rely on technology instead!
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Portrait of Dmitrii SpirinDmitrii Spirin was born in Barnaul, Russia, and arrived in the U.S. in 2016. A technology expert, he always likes to keep his finger on the pulse of new developments. He has been happily married for five years, living in Brooklyn with his wife. He studies English in Susan Rhodes’s Improving Literacy through Literature class. Elaine Sohn is the site adviser.