What happens when a woman and her daughter find a GoPro on Clifton’s fourth beach?
One day during the week before Valentines Day, Sharday Swanepoel (an architect and stay at home mom) and her one year old daughter Anna, took her husband Matt (a video editor) to work early in the morning.
As was their habit, mother and daughter went directly to the beach for some play time.
The two of them love playing around the rock pools looking for starfish and on the soft sand of Clifton’s famous fourth beach where Anna won’t get hurt if she falls.
While they were exploring a rock pool, Sharday noticed something out of place and after further investigation found a GoPro camera under some seaweed.
Most stories like this will end up with claims of finder’s keepers, but not this time.
Swanepoel decided to find the owner of the GoPro.
The easiest way to do that was by putting an image contained by the GoPro out on social media.
As part of a parenthood experiment, both Matt and Sharday had been off Facebook for the past year.
They contacted Jesin Matthews, a colleague of Matt’s at the Saltriver based Priest Post Production Company and asked him to share a picture on his Facebook profile.
It took less than a week for the rightful owner to make contact.
By that time, their Facebook post had received hundreds of likes and had been shared by as many people.
The owner of the GoPro, Jean Cilliers was out of Cape Town on a business trip when he received word that his camera had been found. He arrived back to the Mothercity on Friday evening and rushed to the Swanepoel house to get his camera.
Sharday Swanepoel was awarded with a bunch of flowers for her honesty, but the real reward lies in the story she will one day be able to tell her daughter Anna.
“Things change when you have kids. I just wanted to do what I would love to see my child do in a situation like this,” Sharday Swanepoel told the Herald.
The Herald was unable to reach Cilliers for comment.