After A Boy Reeled An Old Purse Out Of The Water, His Aunt Looked Inside And Took Decisive Action

When the young boy felt his line dip into the water, he was certain he'd got a big catch on his line. “I felt that I really had a fish,” Brodie told InsideEdition.com. “But then when I got it up to the surface, I was like, 'I ain’t got no fish.'”

To be sure, 11-year-old Brodie will vividly remember the fight for his massive catch on July 3, 2017, for a long time. And all because of what was actually hanging on the end of the boy’s rod when he managed to pull his line in.

The boy and the small fishing party he had joined that day, at Lake Hartwell in Anderson County, SC, had all been excited when Brodie had snagged something big. But that excitement turned to astonishment because Brodie had caught hold of something that was not a fish at all. The boy’s prize was a water-logged and leathery old bag.

When the party set out on the fishing trip to the local reservoir that morning, young Brodie had one thing on his mind: his box-fresh Ugly Stik fishing rod. He was eager to try out his new piece of kit — but also anxious that no harm should come to it. But some kind of damage seemed increasingly likely when the boy snagged what he thought was a big one.

In the week following the fishing expedition, Brodie spoke to ABC News about the catch of the day. “I felt like it was a big fish because it was bobbing my rod up and down,” he said, adding, “I’d just gotten an Ugly Stik, so I was scared I was gonna break my rod. I was scared the line was going to snap.”

Despite his fears, the determined young angler kept up the struggle. He alerted the rest of his fishing buddies to the big excitement. This was when Ben Myers — a distant relative of Brodie — stepped up to help his young relative to bring in the extra-heavy haul. However, once Brodie pulled it from the water, he realized that what he had struggled with wasn’t a fish at all. Understandably, the boy’s first reaction was to feel a little let down after all that effort.

But Ben was quick to recognize the muddy item for what it was. With more experience of fishing, the older angler knew what a rarity the pre-teen had reeled in. Also speaking to ABC, Ben said, “I told him, ‘You ain’t got no fish, you got a treasure!’” Ben soon helped Brodie to change his disappointed tune.

“We might catch a can here or something like that. But as far as a woman’s purse, that’s a first for me,” Ben continued to the news cameras. “I’ve been fishing on this lake all my life, and that’s the first time I saw something be caught like this.”

Fortunately, the purse had been zipped when it had fallen into the water. That meant the bag’s contents weren’t completely destroyed. This despite being submerged under what Ben estimated to be almost 30 feet of water in that part of Lake Hartwell. So as Brodie and Ben opened the bag up, the inquisitive pair found out a little bit more about the purse's owner.

The purse contained plenty of evidence about the owner. Brodie and Ben discovered two tubes of lipstick and cards so old that some of the stores they belonged to are now long out of business. At the bottom of the bag they even found a teasing comb — presumably to get the owner’s hair to the optimum height.

Most important of all, however, was the fact that whoever owned the purse also carried her photographs in there. These indicated that the bag had been lost in a time before smartphones were able to hold a person’s images. And this led to the boys unlocking the key to the mystery.

Brodie and Ben carefully sifted through the sodden photographs. And, despite the fact that the images were faded, Ben's eye was caught by one picture in particular. To his amazement, he realized that he knew the woman in the photo. He later told ABC News, “She’s a friend of the family. I went to school with her nephew, but I hadn’t seen her in ten years.”

The angler grabbed his phone and got in touch with the woman’s nephew. He in turn relayed the news of the bag’s remarkable recovery to his aunt, April Bolt. Later, she spoke to ABC about her astonishment, saying, “I couldn’t believe it. I was lost for words. You never think you’d see it again.”

It turned out that April had lost her purse during a cookout at a marina close to Lake Hartwell that had taken place in 1992. In other words, an unbelievable 25 years had passed since the bag had disappeared. But April believed way back then — and still maintains to this day — that her bag had vanished in suspicious circumstances.

April explained her theory to ABC. Speaking about events in 1992, she said, “We were on the boat and my parents had a condo there and we were grilling burgers and we parked the boat in the slip… There were two guys there fishing and — I hate to accuse anybody — but when we got back I was like, ‘My pocketbook is gone!’”

April well remembered how emotional the loss had made her. “I was crying,” she recalled. “It wasn’t a whole lot of cash — maybe like $60. But a woman fits her whole life in her purse. It was devastating.” April was also upset that her cosmetics had disappeared. “My favorite lipstick was in there and the color was discontinued,” she ruefully chuckled.

And, while April was undoubtedly delighted to see her favorite lipstick again, it was something else she carried in her bag that meant the most. Among the photos preserved inside the purse that Ben had used to identify April were some precious pictures of her son. April explained, “My son is 26 now, but he was 15 months then, and I had all his photos that were professionally taken in my wallet. They have water damage, but you can make him out.”

Reflecting back on Brodie’s amazing big catch, neither Ben nor April could believe what had happened. “It was pretty wild,” Ben told ABC News. “You fish up a purse — for one — then you actually know whose it was…” April said that the bag’s recovery from a depth of almost 30 feet, and a quarter of a century gone “meant the world” to her.

However, following the discovery, April is trying to figure out why the universe wanted her to have her bag back. “Everyone keeps telling me, ‘There’s got to be a meaning to why you’re finding this so many years later,’” she said. And if she had known where to look, April could have spoken to a man named Paul Burgoyne about this very thing. Paul had been through the exact same thing — and found a reason in the mysterious ways of the universe.

On May 13, 2014, a team from the marine ecology department at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, was conducting a scientific dive. But what the team ended up discovering was — to most non-marine biologists, at least — a lot more interesting than sea stars. While diving, two of the students found a camera covered in algae and sea creatures. It looked like an ancient relic — and it started a new mystery.

Back on the boat, Bamfield Marine Science’s dive and safety officer, Siobhan Gray, took the opportunity to study the students’ unexpected discovery. And as she was fascinated by both the camera and the fauna growing on its surface, she ultimately decided to bring the artifact back to shore.

Upon studying the camera, Siobhan discovered that it had developed quite the ecosystem. As well as harboring algae, the body of the camera had become a home for two brittle stars — creatures similar to starfish — along with a sea cucumber. But the most exciting find was yet to come.

For when the scientists opened up the camera and looked inside, they found something unexpected. Despite being covered in a black growth, the device’s memory card appeared to be intact. Could the photos be accessible too?

“My first thought about the camera was, are there still images on the card?” Siobhan told The Vancouver Sun. Then she described what she did next. “I cleaned the contacts off of the [memory card], put it in my computer — and it worked.”

She was stunned to discover that the eight-gigabyte Lexar Platinum II card was still full of photographs and videos — the last of which was dated July 30, 2012. Many of the pictures were of groups of people and looked to have been taken at an event such as a family get-together or reunion. But that wasn’t all.

Apparently, the card also hosted a video dated July 31, 2012 — almost two full years before the camera had been discovered. And as seen in the clip, someone had captured footage of a full moon reflected in the glassy surface of a calm sea.

According to Siobhan, the video was so evocative that she believed she was witnessing the final moments before the camera was lost. The dive and safety officer claimed that while she was watching the clip, she expected it to finish with the device hitting the water and sinking all the way to the ocean floor. But no such dramatic ending came.

Then, after realizing that somebody somewhere may be missing the photographs, Siobhan launched a mission to try and locate the original owner. But this was easier said than done.

Professor of marine ecology Isabelle Côté tweeted one of the photographs from the camera with the hashtag #Detectives in the hope that someone would recognize the subjects. Still, even though the message received more than a hundred retweets, nobody from the small local community came forward with any information — at first.

In the end, it was a more old-fashioned manner of networking that succeeded. Hoping to track down the owner of the camera, Siobhan made a poster that featured one of the group photos from the memory card. Afterward, she pinned it on a local community message board, appealing for anyone with information to get in touch. Then, about seven days later, Siobhan struck gold.

Coincidentally, she was walking past the noticeboard where her poster was displayed when she happened to meet the driver of a local water taxi. And, apparently, he had previously spotted her notice and believed that he had some vital information to share.

According to the water taxi driver, there had been a serious boating accident in the area some years previously. Then, after seeing Siobhan’s poster, he had begun to wonder if the camera may have belonged to the man involved. And although he couldn’t be sure, he suggested that Siobhan speak to the coast guard for further information.

Without hesitation, Siobhan took down the poster and headed to the coast guard station on foot. And while there, she subsequently showed the photograph to a friend who agreed with the water taxi driver. You see, one of the men pictured in the snapshot bore a strong resemblance to the person whose boat had sunk back in 2012.

Keen to get to the bottom of the mystery, the coast guard member rooted through the station’s files to find the record of the incident. And, eventually, they found the information they had been seeking. According to their reports, the man in question was named Paul Burgoyne, and he lived in Vancouver, BC.

In a lucky twist, the records also contained a telephone number for Paul. But although the coast guard member attempted to contact him, they could not get through. Instead, they left an answerphone message including Siobhan’s contact details — and just days later, the startled citizen returned the call.

So, on the evening of May 21, 2014, Siobhan and Paul finally managed to resolve the strange mystery. Amazingly, the sailor confirmed that the camera really was his and that he had lost it in a shipwreck two years earlier. What’s more, the dramatic incident had indeed occurred just moments after the full moon video had been filmed.

But how did Paul feel to be reunited with his camera after losing it in such terrifying circumstances? “He was thrilled,” Siobhan said. “He says when he got off the phone with the coast guard, [he] and his wife were laughing a great deal and mentioned how lucky he was.”

Artist Paul had been sailing to his summerhouse in Tahsis, BC, when he had found himself in difficulty on the night of July 30, 2012. After seemingly getting lost in bad weather, the seafarer’s boat had crashed into the rocks. And owing to the severe damage sustained as a result of the impact, the craft soon sank beneath the waves.

Meanwhile, Paul had managed to swim to shore, although he ultimately found himself stranded — and with hypothermia quickly setting in. Luckily, he was able to attract the attention of patrons at a nearby cliff-top inn, and these people contacted the coast guard. And then finally, after six hours, Paul was rescued from his perilous situation.

Yet hundreds of Paul’s possessions had been lost to the ocean, never to be seen again — for the most part. Even so, this strange string of coincidences ultimately led to the artist being reunited with his camera two years later.

“That just shocked me,” Paul told national broadcaster CBC in 2014. “Getting the camera, or the photos back, that’s really quite wonderful… I have a new respect for, you know, these electronics. You throw most of it away every two years, but that little card is an amazing bit of technology.”

However, the discovery was also tinged with poignancy, as Paul revealed that one of the photographs on the card depicted him and his family at Lake of the Woods in Ontario, Canada. Apparently, the clan had traveled to the location in order to scatter the ashes of Paul’s late parents. And this wasn’t the only bittersweet memory the find stirred up, either.

Following the resurfacing of the camera, you see, Paul found himself reflecting upon the night when he almost died. “Right away, I thought about that bliss that I felt when the ocean went calm. And I was sitting at the back of the boat all by myself and thinking, you know, ‘What could be better than this?’” he told CBC.

At that time, Paul had supposedly believed that the vessel was under control — only to be brought back to reality in a terrifying manner. “I thought I had the boat on autopilot, but clearly I had made a mistake,” he continued. “The next thing, all hell was breaking loose.” And before long, his 30-foot trawler Bootlegger was wrecked.

Despite these painful memories, though, Paul was grateful to Siobhan, who soon made arrangements to mail the card to his address. Nevertheless, they make sure to back up the photographs — just in case. “That card seems to be a little unlucky,” said Isabelle Côté.