Marcie Callewaert was en route to her water-access Tofino property last June, moving from boat to canoe, when she heard a splash.
She didn’t realize it until later, but it was the sound of her wallet falling into the ocean.
She returned to the area and combed the beach, searching for the dark-green wallet.
A local diver also went looking, but turned up empty-handed.
“The eelgrass was so thick that he really had no visual,” she says. “When he came up after an hour, he told me he had been using his hands to pat down the seafloor.”
Then, on Feb. 14, while on a walk with her dogs, Callewaert, who has lived in Clayoquot Sound for 10 years, spotted the wallet.
“There it was, like right in front of me,” she says.
She had to use a knife to cut through the salt-water-logged wallet. Luckily, everything was still inside, including her radio operator licence.
Callewaert shared the experience on social media and garnered an impressive 7.4 million views for just one TikTok video.
“It was insane,” she says. “I just posted it for people that already knew about it and it blew up.”
She’s had people questioning if the video is real, but explains that coastal life is a little different from what people might be used to.
“This stuff does happen for us out here, if you’re in the same places all the time.”
If the wallet hadn’t washed up this month, she believes it would have been gone for good.
“I think it was stuck within the eelgrass and the sand [given] how much sand infiltrated it,” she says, noting there are strong southeast winds where she lives and stuff from the ocean bottom gets pulled up during low tides.
“I do feel very lucky.”
Callewaert is considering using the $10 that was still in her wallet to buy a lottery ticket.
As for the salty wallet, she plans to keep it.
“It’s definitely sticking around,” she says. “The coins and the stickers are going to end up becoming like good-luck charms of some sort.”
