Lucky fisherman has been reunited with a lost iPhone that survived more than 18 months at the bottom of an icy lake.

Michael Guntrum, from Knox in Pennsylvania, was fishing on Kyle Lake last year when the handset dropped through a tiny hole in the ice.

“Lost my phone today,” he wrote in a Facebook post on March 2015. “Long story short. Ice fishing,+ hole in ice = iPhone at bottom of lake.”

Not even the most optimistic person would expect to see that iPhone ever again, but Mr Guntrum appears to be one lucky fisherman.

He got a lucky break when the lake was drained in September 2015 and eventually found stuck under some mud by mechanical engineer Daniel Kalgren.

BuzzFeed News reports Mr Kalgren was exploring the bottom of the lake with a metal detector when he stumbled upon the phone.

He took the iPhone 4 home and put it in some rice to dry out - amazingly the handset actually turned on and he was able to retrieve the owner’s number.  

It actually worked!