Your iPhone went in the sea on a Chalong boat day.

Chalong Pier is where the day-trip boats leave from — Phi Phi, Coral Island, Phang Nga Bay — and it is where more Phuket iPhones meet salt water than anywhere else on the island. If yours is wet right now, stop reading the price list and do the four things below. Then get it to our Patong workshop, 25–35 minutes away.

Tell us what happened Water damage repair

Do this before you do anything else

Power it off. Now. Do not check whether it still works. A wet board with current running through it shorts; a wet board with no power does not. This one step decides more outcomes than everything we do on the bench.
Rinse it in fresh water. This feels insane and it is correct. Sea water dries and leaves salt crystals, and salt crystals keep corroding the board long after the phone looks dry. Bottled water from the boat cooler is fine. Rinse, then shake the water out of the port and dry the outside.
Do not charge it. Not a wall socket, not a power bank, not the boat's USB port. Putting voltage through a salt-wet board is what turns a repairable phone into a data-recovery job.
Get it to Patong within 12–24 hours. We strip it, desalt the board in an ultrasonic bath, dry it and treat the corrosion. Devices that arrive inside that window recover around 80% of the time.

🚕 25–35 min from Chalong Pier

🌊 ~80% recover inside 24 hrs

💧 Ultrasonic desalt board-level

🛡️ 90-day warranty

🕘 Open daily 9am–9pm

Why it is always a Chalong boat day

Nearly every island trip on this side of Phuket pushes off from Chalong Pier. The speedboats to Phi Phi and Maya Bay, the ferries out to Coral Island, the long runs north into Phang Nga Bay for James Bond Island — they all board at the same pontoons, and they all involve the same handful of moments where a phone gets lost.

The step from the pontoon into a rocking boat, with a bag on one shoulder and a phone in the other hand. The open bow at 30 knots, where spray comes over in sheets and nobody wants to put the camera away. The snorkel stop, when the phone goes into a shirt pocket rather than a dry bag because it is only five minutes. The group photo on the swim platform. Almost nobody drops a phone in the sea while sitting still — it happens during the transition, when you are moving between boat and water and your hands are full.

And unlike a hotel pool, the sea is not just water. It is an electrolyte. That distinction is the entire reason this page exists.

Salt is the problem, not water

Fresh water is a poor conductor and it evaporates cleanly. Sea water conducts current between anything it touches, and when it dries it does not leave your phone alone — it leaves salt behind on the logic board, and that salt draws moisture out of Phuket's humid air and keeps a slow corrosion reaction going for days or weeks. This is why a phone that survived the boat trip can die the following Thursday back home.

It is also why rice is worse than useless here. Rice, at best, dries the phone. Drying a salt-soaked phone without rinsing it just converts salt water into dry salt sitting directly on the circuitry. A fresh-water rinse removes the salt; drying alone concentrates it.

Modern iPhones carry an IP68 rating, and people quote it at us constantly. Treat it as marketing, not armour: it is tested in a lab, in fresh water, on a brand-new device with perfect seals. Your three-year-old phone, with adhesive that has cooked through a Phuket hot season and a screen that has been off once already, is not that device. We open salt-flooded IP68 iPhones most weeks.

What the clock actually does to your chances

Recovery is a function of time in contact with salt, not time since the drop — a phone that was powered off and rinsed is barely ageing, while a phone left switched on in a bag is being destroyed by the minute. Assuming the phone was not rinsed and not switched off, this is roughly how it goes.

Time in salt	What is happening inside	Typical outcome
Under 2 hours	Salt still in solution, little crystallisation	Best case. Full ultrasonic desalt, most boards come back clean
2–24 hours	Salt crystallising, early corrosion on connectors	Around 80% recover with board cleaning and corrosion treatment
1–3 days	Visible green corrosion, damaged solder joints, often a dead display	Repairable in many cases, but component-level work and more likely to need a screen too
Over 3 days	Deep corrosion under shields and chips	Phone may be beyond economic repair — but the storage often survives, so ask about data

The honest read: if you rinsed it and killed the power on the boat, you have bought yourself a day. If you have been carrying a switched-on, sea-soaked iPhone around since yesterday morning, come straight in.

What we do on the bench

A saltwater iPhone is not a "leave it in a bag of silica" job. We take the device fully apart, remove the board, and put it through an ultrasonic bath that lifts salt and residue out from under the shields and chips where no amount of air drying will ever reach. The board is dried, the corroded joints are inspected under a microscope and treated, and then it is reassembled and function-tested — screen, Face ID, cameras, speakers, microphones, charging. Sea water frequently takes the display out even when the board lives, so we tell you up front if the quote is likely to include a screen.

What the bench work involves

💧

Saltwater rescue

Full strip, ultrasonic desalt, corrosion treatment, function test.

Quoted after diagnosisWater damage details

🗂️

Data recovery

When the phone is gone but the photos from the trip are not.

Quoted after diagnosisData recovery details

📱

Screen, if the sea took it

Salt kills displays. Often quoted alongside the board work.

Quoted with the board workEstimate my model

Water work carries a 30-day diagnostic warranty; screens and batteries fitted at the same time carry the full 90 days. We diagnose first and write down a fixed price before anyone touches a screwdriver — and if you do not want to spend it, you pay nothing and take the phone away. If the board is unrecoverable we will say so rather than charge you to find that out slowly.

Getting to Patong from Chalong

Allow 25–35 minutes by Grab or taxi: north from Chalong Circle up Chao Fa West Road, then over Patong Hill. The hill is why it takes longer than the map thinks, and the late-afternoon window when every day-trip boat has just docked is the slowest run of the day. Come straight from the pier if you can — a wet phone does not improve while you shower and change.

Not urgent? Neighbouring areas have their own pages: Rawai for long-stay residents and boat-life wear, Phuket Town for everyday device repair, and Patong if you are already on this side of the hill.

Saltwater questions we get from the pier

Four things, in order. One: hold the side button and power it off — do not check whether it still works, because every second it stays powered while wet is a second the salt can short a live circuit. Two: rinse it under fresh water. That sounds wrong, but sea water leaves salt crystals behind as it dries and those crystals keep eating the board; bottled drinking water from the boat cooler is fine. Three: do not plug it into a charger or a power bank, not even to see if it lights up. Four: bring it to our Patong workshop within 12–24 hours.

No. Rice does almost nothing that open air does not do faster, and it does nothing at all about the real problem, which is salt. Drying a salt-soaked iPhone without rinsing it just leaves dry salt crystals sitting on the logic board, and dry salt still corrodes as soon as it meets humidity. Skip the rice, rinse the phone with fresh water, keep it off, and bring it in.

A working phone is the most dangerous case, because it makes people wait. Saltwater damage is corrosion, not an instant failure — the board is being eaten slowly and the phone often dies three to ten days later, by which time the damage is much harder to reverse and much more expensive to fix. If your iPhone took sea water and still turns on, that is the ideal moment for an ultrasonic clean, not a reason to skip it.

No — do not try to charter a boat back. What matters most is what state the phone is in while it waits, not the exact hour it reaches the bench. A phone that was powered off and rinsed with fresh water on the boat is in far better condition after 24 hours than a phone that was left switched on and dried in the sun for two. Do the protocol on the boat, keep it off, and come straight from Chalong Pier when you land. Devices brought in within roughly 24 hours have around an 80% recovery rate.

Often, yes — the two questions are separate. Even when a board is too corroded to make the phone reliable again, the storage chip frequently survives, and recovering photos and messages from a drowned iPhone is a job we do regularly. Data recovery is quoted once we have opened the phone and seen what the board looks like, and we tell you what we can see before you commit to anything.

Around 25–35 minutes by Grab or taxi, north up Chao Fa West Road and then over Patong Hill. It is longer than the map suggests because of the hill, so allow the full 35 minutes in the late-afternoon return-from-the-islands traffic. We are open daily 9am–9pm; a saltwater case does not need an appointment, just come.