Georgia lost and found: How a phone missing at sea turned up 7 months later.
Editor’s note: This ‘‘Dispatch’' is from Adam Van Brimmer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s bureau chief in Savannah. Dispatches are occasional snapshots of people, places, scenes or moments from around Georgia that our reporters come across. They aim to be immersive and aren’t always tied to a news event.
TYBEE ISLAND ― Find My iPhone is the app you hope you never need but are glad for when you do. With it, you can figure out where you misplaced your phone. Or where the thief who took it is headed. Or, in the case of my daughter’s device, where Savannah’s notoriously powerful tides are pushing it.
For several days last August, my family and I used the app to track that trek. Initially, we did so in hopes the cellphone, encased in a watertight container, would wash up on a beach or get lodged someplace we could hop in a boat and retrieve it. After a few tide cycles of watching the dot move up and down the Savannah River, the digital hunt became more entertainment than a quest for recovery.
How long would the battery hold out? Once the signal went dark, would the phone, like a message in a bottle, someday be discovered? And where?
My wife, a devout Roman Catholic, prayed to her favorite saint on the device’s behalf. “St. Anthony, St. Anthony come around. Abby’s lost her cellphone and it needs to be found.”
Seven months later, long after the Find My iPhone trail went cold, St. Anthony — and a beachcombing family from down the Georgia coast in Richmond Hill — delivered. The container was found floating along the northern tip of Ossabaw Island, some 20 miles (four islands and three river mouths) south of where it was lost.
An Instagram message connected finder and seeker (my daughter’s driver’s license and college ID were with the phone). And a few days later, it was reclaimed.
The saga of the cellphone in a Tupperware is now one that will live in family lore for generations.
How it was lost
For a beach-loving college student like my daughter, the summer of 2025 was a dream.
Family friends who own a beach house on Tybee Island but summer in Pennsylvania needed a housesitter. The home sits just over the sand dunes from Channel Beach, which faces the mouth of the Savannah River, a prime shrimping grounds. And where shrimp are plentiful, so are hungry dolphins.
Abby quickly fell into a late afternoon routine: work, gym, dinner, paddleboard. At dusk, the shrimp boats would come through en route to the nearby docks, and a SeaWorld-like show would commence all around her.
Wanting to capture in photos and video the playful frolicking of the dolphins, she engineered a harness using zip ties for the paddleboard, pulled a Tupperware container from the kitchen drawer and voilà. She’d paddle out, wait for the dolphin telltales — tails and fins — to breach the water’s surface, pull out the phone and do her nature thing.
Then, as she returned to the shore on her last night before returning to school, calamity struck. She was in a rush to beat an approaching thunderstorm, flipped the board to carry it onto the beach, and the Tupperware slipped from the harness. It was nearly dark, and by the time she noticed, the phone had floated away.
She ran to the house to fire up the laptop and the Find My iPhone tracker. Twenty minutes later, we stood chest deep in the water off the beach in the dark not far from where the app showed the device. But at least 10 yards of ocean was between us and the dot on the laptop screen, and it was low tide. We wouldn’t get any closer, and once the tide shifted, the cellphone would move upriver.
The next day, she ordered a new phone and ID cards. We tracked the device until it went offline two days later, and its meandering path made us chuckle. By the end of the week, the incident was nothing more than a funny story to tell.
That was until the Hixson and Hillard families took a boat ride to Ossabaw on the first beach day of the season this March.
How it was found
Erin Hixson didn’t know what to make of the detritus her friend Kari Hillard spotted in the dunes along the northern tip of Ossabaw Island. Sand dollars, horseshoe crab carcasses and bleached, empty beer cans are common along the stretch of beach, where the Ogeechee River meets the Atlantic Ocean.
But this was a clear piece of Tupperware with a cellphone inside that was partially melted by the sun. She opened it and slid the ID cards out of the adhesive wallet stuck to the back of the device.
Her three children — 7-year-old Bennett, 9-year-old Clara Kate and 11-year-old Emma — panicked, thinking the young woman pictured on the ID had been out boating, gotten shipwrecked and lost at sea. Hixson tried to calm her children but they persisted. So Erin pulled out her phone and after some internet sleuthing found the phone owner’s Instagram feed.
Hixson sent a message, saying she’d “found your phone and things!” Days passed with no reply. She reached out to others tagged on the IG account. Still nothing. Then came a return message from the owner: “WAIT THERE IS NO WAY, I LOST THAT BACK IN AUGUST”
“It was like finding treasure,” Erin Hixson said.
There was a short debate in my family about retrieving the phone. Abby had replaced all that she’d lost, and the phone was in bad shape. But curiosity won out, and we were going to pass within 10 minutes of the Hixon house on a spring break trip.
Erin Hixson put it in her mailbox that morning and with the help of St. Anthony and GPS, we found the house and picked it up.
Abby, who is currently living in Augusta, still hasn’t seen it yet. She still marvels at the unlikely finding of the phone.
“I thought it had sunk; I didn’t think the Tupperware would work,” she said. “I thought it was on the bottom of the river. There or Europe.”
About the Author
Adam Van Brimmer is a journalist who covers politics and Coastal Georgia news for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
