Camera's incredible 1,100 mile voyage

A Dutchman who lost his camera while scuba diving in the Caribbean has got it back - after it washed up in Florida.

Coastguard Paul Shultz spotted the bright red Nikon camera pounding against the rocks of a marina in Key West, Miami, reports the Daily Telegraph.

Inside the waterproof plastic case, the camera was almost pristine and Mr Shultz was able to view the photographs and video it contained.

There were pictures of two men preparing to scuba dive and a family nestled together on a sofa - and a mysterious video of splashing water and what looked like a fin.

"There was nothing on the pictures that said this camera belongs to so and so," Mr Shultz said.

He uploaded the images to Scubaboard.com, an online diving community, asking for help. Within days, users identified the location as Aruba, a Dutch island off the Venezuelan coast.

A plane's tail number was visible in one shot, and a computer search showed the aircraft was on the island on the day the photograph was taken.

Mr Shultz posted the pictures on travel websites Cruisecritic and Aruba.com, and two days later a local woman contacted him to say she recognised the children in the photos as classmates of her son.

The camera was soon back with owner Dick de Bruin, a Royal Dutch Navy sergeant, who had lost it seven months earlier: "I have a smile on my face. I can't stop laughing about it," he said.

The video, which has been viewed more than 200,000 times on YouTube, shows an encounter with a sea turtle who mistook the camera for a meal and inadvertently switched it on. The date is January - two months after the camera was lost.

"When I told people what Paul had done, they were astonished. They didn't believe it," said Sgt de Bruin, who has been stationed with his family in Aruba for the past three years.

"But we have the sea turtle on film proving the camera floated from Aruba to the US. It's unbelievable, but it's true."