One woman’s beloved camera will soon be back in her hands after Brian Hwang used the power of the internet to rally strangers around the cause of finding the owner of a lost GoPro.

“I had said my goodbyes to it,” said Sarah Joyce, who lost her camera in the ocean over a week ago. “The odds were one million to one. I kind of just gave up on it, I said there’s no way I’m going to find this.”

Her one attempt at locating it was to post on Facebook asking if anyone had seen the camera. But the answer would come not from Facebook, but from a different social media giant.

It was August 22, and Brian Hwang was running along the shoreline of Florencia Bay Beach in Ucluelet, B.C., one of the last stops on a road trip that Hwang had been taking with his wife and two children.

“I saw the GoPro mounted on a stick in the water,” Hwang said. “(It was) under about a foot of water … near the shore, kind of rolling back and forth with the waves and I retrieved it.”

He didn’t see anyone around who had dropped it, so he took it with him when he finished his run. The camera was “jammed up with salt and sand,” he said, and since he didn’t have access to a computer, he forgot about it until he returned home to Calgary on August 28.

Miraculously, despite its time in the water, the camera still worked once he cleaned it, and was full of photos taken by the owner.

Having seen Reddit solve lost and found cases in the past, Hwang decided to post one of these photos to the website.

“It didn’t even occur to me to contact RCMP, like some on Reddit suggested I do,” Hwang said.

Luckily, it turned out that the RCMP did not need to get involved. Roughly four hours after Hwang posted the photo, an unlikely saviour rose from the comment section: Reddit user vanilla_butthole.

Jenn Ralph, the woman behind the unusual screen name, commented that she knew the woman who was holding the camera in the photo. The two women had worked together at a Sporting Life in Ottawa a year ago, but hadn’t spoken since Joyce moved away.

“I bet someone would have recognized her, I just happened to be the first one,” Ralph said. “I was excited to let her know because I know how expensive (GoPros) are and that it sucks to lose memories like that.”

Joyce was “shocked” to hear from Ralph that the camera, which contained hundreds of photos and videos, had been found.

“I started crying. I told all my friends,” she said. She said her initial reaction was to think, “what? Is this real life?”

She travels a lot, and frequently used the GoPro to film videos of her adventures to post on her Instagram.

The photo that Hwang posted on Reddit had been taken when she was in Alaska in May. She was visiting a friend in Florencia Bay when the GoPro “flew off (her) hand” while she was attempting to learn how to surf.

She said when she talked to Hwang, he’d viewed some of the footage of her surfing and told her: “Next time, wear the wristband!”

Hwang was surprised at how quickly his post was responded to.

“I did not anticipate the situation getting resolved as fast as it did. The internet really has made the phrase “it’s a small world” come true in that sense,” Hwang said.

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“The Reddit management team actually sent me a message saying they were so happy for me,” Joyce said.

The camera was shipped out today, and barring shipping disasters, Joyce should receive it soon. She said she was “thankful” for everyone who helped get the camera back to her.

“I still don’t even understand how Reddit works,” she said. “The internet is so powerful.”

With files from Bryann Aguilar and Annie Arnone