Paul Shultz was walking along the pier of a Key West marina when he saw what looked like a rotting tomato pounding against the rocks. The Coast Guard investigator waded ankle-deep into the water to fish out the ocean rubbish: a bright red Nikon camera, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. Its waterproof plastic case was covered with six months' worth of crusty sea growth, but the camera itself was almost pristine when he found it May 16. There were photos of two men preparing to scuba dive and a towheaded family nestled together on a couch. There was a mysterious relic settled deep into the sea floor. And even a puzzling video clip of splashing water that appeared to have been taken as the camera thrashed around. After looking through the pictures, Shultz adopted the screen name of “Aquahound” and took his hunt online. He uploaded the images on Scubaboard.com, hoping some diving aficionados could help identify where they were taken. Within days, the Internet sleuths had parsed the pictures and found some clues all pointing to Aruba, a Dutch island off Venezuela's coast that's 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) from Key West. There was a plane's tail number - and a computer search showed the aircraft was in Aruba the day the photo was taken. There was a blue-roofed building that searchers pinpointed to the island using Google Earth. Schultz posted the pictures on the travel websites Cruisecritic and Aruba.com, and within two days was contacted by an Aruban woman who said she recognized the children in some of the photos as classmates of her son. She contacted the family, the de Bruins, and all the pieces came together. De Bruin, a sergeant in the Royal Dutch Navy, has been stationed with his family in Aruba. The camera floated away from de Bruin while he and a dive team were salvaging an anchor from the USS Powell for a World War II memorial. The video clip has been seen more than 200,000 times on YouTube, globally.
