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Low tide solves mystery of floating Lime bike in West Vancouver

A rental bike perched on a pipe near Ambleside Beach seemingly braved the waves of high tide

A curiously parked Lime bike in West Vancouver could have been rented by SpongeBob himself.

On Saturday morning around 9 a.m., passersby near Ambleside Beach took notice of one of the bike share units seemingly parked on top of the water’s surface.

Later on, the receding tide revealed the bike to be sitting at the end of a storm drain that empties into Burrard inlet.

When Linda Munro first spotted the water-bound bicycle, she alerted Lime that one of the company’s bikes needed attention.

“I tried to rescue it but the water was too deep at 9 a.m. (up to my armpits midway out to it),” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Lime’s official account replied that her note had been shared with the local operations team so they could take action.

At around 10:30 a.m., Shohreh Bagheri took a few photos of the bike perched atop the exposed storm drain pipe.

“We saw the bike from the distance first, then I decided to go down and take a closer shot,” he said. “The bike was just there with no one for an hour that I was hanging out with a group of people. We all found this strange to see, as it could get easily [be] thrown in the water!”’

A Lime spokesperson confirmed with the North Shore News that the bike has since been recovered, adding that the company works hard to respond to situations like this immediately and make sure that Lime bikes and scooters that are parked somewhere they shouldn't be are collected quickly.

According to tide data, high tide on Saturday was 6:29 a.m. – before that, low tide was at 11:30 p.m. Friday evening.