A sustained social media campaign to find former Victoria College student Chris Hesford, who owned the missing GoPro camera, went viral after the kit was found washed up on a beach in New South Wales by Australian Steve Carmody.
The Brisbane resident put a message and photo of Mr Hesford on Facebook in an attempt to find the Jerseyman, who lost the camera in September last year.
The Australian’s plea was then shared nearly 9,000 times as people from all around the world joined his mission to reunite Mr Hesford with his film and photos.
And now, months after he dropped the device into the River Tweed, losing thousands of irreplaceable images and film footage taken while backpacking in Australia, America and Fiji, Mr Hesford is due to get the memory card sent back to his home in London.
Mr Hesford, who is studying in the capital, said he woke to a ‘bombardment of Facebook messages’ and was delighted to be reunited with his pictures.
He told the JEP: ‘I’m still dealing with the fallout now. My Facebook page is going mad!
‘I currently have the Today Show in Sydney organising me to go on their show to discuss it, which is pretty exciting.’
The hunt to find Mr Hesford began when his broken camera was found washed up on Fingal Beach at mouth of the River Tweed.
Mr Carmody managed to recover the device’s 32 GB memory card and saw images of the Islander and decided he would start a social media campaign to try to find him.
‘Ok Facebook do your thing,’ Mr Carmody wrote on Facebook.
The message continued: ‘If we can track this bloke down I have 32 GB of precious memories to be returned.
‘Bad news is that the camera is dead but your memory stick survives. Inbox, me if you know this bloke.’
He posted the status on the 20 January and was inundated with responses on Facebook and Twitter.
As the search gained momentum, Mr Carmody told Australian media that the camera’s memory card held some precious memories.
‘He has been to New York, he has been to Arizona, to the Grand Canyon and was playing football in Fiji… so they are precious memories.
‘I thought, if these were my memories I would love to get them back so I took one photo of him and put it on Facebook and shared it publicly.’
- Strange squares of rubber bearing the name of an area in Indonesia. The tiles are made from gutta-percha, a latex material which dates back to the 1900s abd were likely made at a Dutch-owned plantation in West Java.
- A barrel of wine from the wreck of the French steamer Briseis, off Guernsey, was washed ashore in 1937 and was found near First Tower slipway ?
- A seal pup was found washed up in Grouville in 2009. It was initially denied access to treatment in the UK as it did not have a passport or legitimate registration documents ?
- A dead coypu or swamp beaver a semiaquatic rodent was found last year near LEtacq ?
- A small French fishing boat washed up on Beauport Beach over the Christmas period and was spotted by a member of the Harbours department ?
- Other items found on Jerseys shores include a seed pod from Costa Rica, an 8mlong marker buoy from Brittany and the odd message in a bottle.[figure caption=”Sian Broomfield with her dog Loki and a message in a bottle” title=”_ROB4264″ align=”center” url=”/wpmvc/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/314395.jpg” id=”1131483″ size=”100″][/breakout]
AN eight-year-old boy from Torquay was reunited with his treasured bike that he got for Christmas thanks to a social media campaign after it was stolen.
Harvey Chastney was left devasted after his present was stolen three weeks after he unwrapped it.
After the youngster got home from school, he grabbed his beloved two-wheeler and raced to see his dad at a nearby property.
But ten minutes later they realised the gates of the home had been opened and the bike was gone. Harvey’s mum Amanda Chastney said he son was ‘traumatised’.
But, days later the bike was found the Harvey and his mum were tracked down through social media after the bike was found.
‘I am amazed at the power of social media,’ Mrs Chastney said.
TWINS separated at birth were reunited through Facebook after one of the sisters came across a chance video on Facebook.
Anaïs and Samantha were both born in Busan, South Korea, but were adopted into families on different continents. Anaïs grew up in France while Samantha lived in New Jersey.
More than a quarter-of-a-century on, they connected on social media and discovered that they were twins separated at birth.
Anaïs first spotted her sister thanks to a YouTube video where she noticed how uncannily they looked alike. After seeing on IMDB that Samantha, an actress, had the same birthday that she did and was also born in South Korea, Anaïs felt even more curious. When she discovered that Samantha had made a YouTube video called How It Feels To Be Adopted, Anaïs decided to reach out over Facebook and send a message to the girl who looked just like her.
When Samantha responded confirming that the city in South Korea where she was born was the same city where Anaïs was born, the two decided to talk via Skype.
Once they saw each other and spoke face-to-face, they both felt sure that they were, in fact, biological twins. They ended up meeting in London, and Samantha admits it was ‘weird’.
