Couple’s lost overboard camera found by fishermen
LONDON – A couple who lost their camera when it fell overboard from a cruise ship have been traced after a trawlerman hauled the device from the Atlantic seabed.
Benito Estevez, of Spain, found the camera in his nets with five of the photos still intact on the memory card.
Barbara and Dennis Gregory, from South Africa, were en-route from New York to Southampton on the QM2 in 2008 when they lost their camera in the ocean.
Mrs Gregory said she had never expected to see the camera or the photos again.
"It’s literally a dream come true," she told the BBC.
"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."
Estevez caught the camera in his nets off the west coast of Europe.
He wanted to trace the owners and posted the pictures online.
Speaking through a translator, Mr Estevez told the BBC: "It makes me really happy to see that they have recovered the memories they had lost.
"If it had been any other thing we would have thrown it back into the sea….but these circumstances were different.
"I think it’s because of destiny."
The photographs show Mrs Gregory posing on the deck of a ship, with the now out-of-service QE2 in the background and in another her husband is wearing a woolly tourist hat from Oxford.
The story was broadcast on BBC programme South Today and a friend of the couple, who lives in Chalgrove, Oxfordshire, was just about to switch off her television when she spotted the pictures of her friends.
Mrs Gregory told the BBC the camera dropped into the sea had been the couple’s second of their holiday – after the first was dropped and damaged in New York before the cruise.
Ian Jarrett
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