A camera left behind on a beach in Yorkshire could be reunited with its owner after it filmed itself being swept up by the tide and recorded the beginning of a 500-mile odyssey across the North Sea.

The waterproof camera was discovered on 2 November on the western shore of Süderoog, a tiny German island in the Wadden Sea.

Holger Spreer and Nele Wree, two coastal protection officers who are the island’s sole regular inhabitants, uploaded the contents of the camera’s memory card to a computer and discovered that a number of short video clips had survived the journey without damage.

The camera’s journey through the North Sea

The most recent recording, an 11-minute clip dated 1 September 2017, shows a boy of approximately 10-12 years playing on a beach with a girl, possibly his sister.

At one point the camera is positioned on a rock and left behind. Eventually, the machine is swept up by the incoming tide and the last minutes of the movie feature images of seaweed and the sound of gurgling water.

Spreer and Wree uploaded the clip to the Süderoog Facebook page, commenting that “at last, a piece of flotsam is chatting to us”.



An officer of the German Maritime Search and Rescue Association (DGzRS) spotted the post and contacted the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, one of whose officers recognised the coastal landscape visible in the video as that of the Flamborough Cliffs near Thornwick Bay in east Yorkshire.

Using a computer programme usually employed to calculate the location of people missing at sea, German officers identified the sea coastal stretch as the likely origin of the camera.

Two days later, rescue officers are still waiting to hear from the owner of the camera.

“Of course it’s possible that the people in the film are not from east Yorkshire at all, but a family from Scotland or southern England on a holiday,” said Christian Stipeldey, a spokesman for the DGzRS. “What a shame it would be if the camera is never returned to its rightful owner.”

Spreer said he and his partner had set up a little museum to display the objects swept up on Süderoog’s shore, including fishing equipment, helium balloons and high-heeled shoes. “Only this morning we picked up an oil canister from England,” he said.

“Our hope is that the boy can be reunited with his camera in time for Christmas – that would be a happy ending.”