wedding band Tag
Lost Platinum Wedding Ring Found in San Mateo County
Lost platinum wedding ring found in San Mateo County
Last Saturday, Carl was working around his home in San Mateo County. After a full day of chores, he noticed that his platinum wedding ring was missing. The good news was, he hadn’t left his property all day, so he knew the ring had to be somewhere in the yard. The other good news was, he found RingFinders, the metal detector experts.
Two of us arrived to give Carl’s property a thorough search. In some cases, the recovery takes hours of searching, but not this time. We pulled Carl’s platinum wedding band out of the thick grass on the side of his home within about ten minutes.
Because rings are so dense, when they fall they immediately sink down to the ground level beneath all the blades of grass, where they are practically invisible. Carl’s lawn was healthy and thick, so the ring was completely hidden, even when you looked straight at it. But metal detectors can “see” right through grass, dirt and sand to find missing rings.
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Two Lost Rings Found in Sausalito
Cynthia with her parent's wedding rings
Cynthia always wears her mother’s and father’s wedding rings, which are beautiful hand-made antiques from Chile. She was wearing them last weekend while gardening in her back yard. Unfortunately, when she flung some clippings over the fence, the rings flew off too. After searching fruitlessly for the rings, she searched the web for Metal Detector Rentals and found us.
Cynthia lives on a hill in Sausalito, with a view of the marina from the back. Like many Marin County back yards, her back yard slopes steeply downward. The rings were most likely somewhere on that slope. The first thing we did was to repeat the accident with a “ring on a string,” another gold ring attached to a bright red ribbon so that it would be hard to lose. After five tosses, we could see that the ring consistently landed in a zone starting about 10 feet down the slope. That’s where I started searching.
The hill was covered with thick ivy. Unfortunately, the ivy also covered large rocks, tree stumps, and even some old terrace walls. These hidden obstructions created lots of hollows and crevices that could conceal the rings. I attached the small 6″ search coil to my metal detector, but some areas were so small that I still had to search many areas on hands and knees with a handheld detector.
After an hour on the slope, I had covered the entire target zone with no luck. Further down the hill, the slope was too steep to search. But I still hadn’t detected the area above the target zone, closer to the fence.
Within five minutes of starting to search the new area I pulled out the first ring. Six inches away I found the second one. Both were just eight feet from the fence. The rings were as beautiful as Cynthia had described them, and she was extremely happy to get them back.
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Video of the story that aired on ABC-7 News in Ft. Myers, Florida
Here’s a link to a story ABC-7′s Paul Gessler did about me finding Mya’s Daddy’s wedding ring in the Gulf of Mexico: http://www.abc-7.com/global/story.asp?s=18067257
Lost Ring Found in Saratoga
Lost Ring Found in Saratoga
Today we received a call from a client in Saratoga, a small Bay Area town near Los Gatos and Cupertino. She had just lost a beautiful handmade gold ring from India, while pruning a large jasmine bush in her front yard. She had searched for a metal detector expert on the web, and found us.
When we arrived, we found that the jasmine bush was indeed large-it was a sphere nearly six feet in diameter, and very dense. Our detectors can only scan to a maximum of 8-12 inches deep, so we were a bit worried. First we scanned the entire surface of the bush and an area in the ground around it, and also poked our detectors into the bush as far as they would go. Then our client told us we could easily untie the bush from its pole supports and flip the whole thing over. Once we did this, we scanned the whole bush again without any luck.
Then we scanned the area directly beneath the jasmine, around the area where the stems emerged from the ground. This area had been completely covered by the bush when we arrived. Bingo! Buried in about an inch of leaves and debris, we found the ring, and it was as beautiful as the client had described. The top of the ring featured a carved image of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth. Not a very common ring in the Bay Area!
If you lose a ring in your back yard, or in bushes or planters, try not to disturb the area while you are searching-step gently! You want to avoid causing your lost item to move very far from it’s resting place. In this case, the ring was directly underneath the jasmine bush, but we’ve recovered items thirty feet or more from where they were lost. They were accidentally kicked there by overly enthusiastic searchers. Call us quickly and we’ll find it for you!
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Lost Engagement Ring Found on Baker Beach San Francisco using GPS
Liam and Sarah with the lost ring, now found
Steph contacted me from Austin, Texas after returning home from a trip to San Francisco. While here, she had enjoyed a day on the beach with friends, and took off her grandmother’s engagement ring to apply sunscreen. She set the ring on the blanket, got distracted, and didn’t notice it was missing until back at the hotel. Steph tried looking the next day, but the ring was lost in the sand.
Steph found Ringfinders a few days later. We planned to meet her friend Sarah at the beach, so that she could show us where to search with our metal detectors. Then Sarah remembered that during the day on the beach, she had used the map feature on her iPhone to send their location to other friends who were on the way. Bingo! The map had GPS coordinates of the blanket’s exact location when the ring was lost!
We met Sarah and her fiance Liam at 7:15pm, a half hour before sunset. It turns out that Liam had also used his phone to send a map to other friends, so we had TWO phones with GPS coordinates of the hunt location! By the time we arrived, Sarah and Liam had already drawn a rectangle defining our search area. We found the ring within five minutes, buried near the center of the rectangle. Way to go, Liam and Sarah!
Immediately Sarah took a photo of the ring, and used her iPhone to send it to Steph. It turns out that Steph was at a wedding reception in Austin, and got very excited when she got the photo. She showed it to everyone at the table, and texted back that she was very happy.
We enjoyed the sunset with Sarah and Liam, then headed home happy.
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Steph's heirloom engagement ring
GPS map from Sarah's iPhone
Daughter’s Hand Once Fit Inside Dad’s Lost Wedding Ring, Recovered From The Gulf, off Naples, Florida!
Newborn Daughter's Hand in Dad's Wedding Ring
Every Father’s wedding ring is special. But, when Matt Wilson called us on Valentine’s Day and sent us this photo of his newborn daughter’s hand, easily fitting inside his ring… we knew we had to find it for him!
His miracle baby daughter, Mya, now a happy, healthy young girl, was born 12 weeks early and weighed in at only 1 pound, 10.8 ounces.
Now, years later, while having a photographer shoot their first family portrait, on a beach in Naples, Florida, Matt’s ring ended up in the drink!
He searched for the ring for hours, but ended up having to fly home without it. Then, thanks to TheRingfinders website, Matt was able to find us and sent us a map of the area and the photo of the ring.
It took three trips out to the area, but I was able to find it and return it to the family.
”I still remember the day I got the voice mail from him. I didn’t listen to the entire message, because I heard him say, ‘Hey Matt its Larry. I think I have some good news for you…’. I called him back and he read me the date off the inside of the ring. It was amazing! I had given up hope of it being found… but Larry came through for us!” - Matt Wilson
Our Fun in the Sun is Finding Rings & Things!
Wintering in Southwest Florida means BEACH TIME!
And one of our all-time, favorite things to do at the beach is to help residents and visitors recover valuables they’ve lost in the sand… AND IN THE WATER!
Here’s a link to some pics Naples Daily News freelance photographer Jason Easterly caught of us combing the beach for a gentleman’s wedding ring that was lost in the surf on Marco Island.
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/mar/24/lost-ring-finder-gulf-of-mexico-beachcomber-naples/
Platinum Wedding Ring Recovered from The Gulf of Mexico, off SANIBEL ISLAND, FL
While checking-out of The Sundial Resort on Sanibel Island, Mike realized his platinum wedding ring was missing! It had rarely left his finger since his marriage to Erika, ten years ago. But, now, it was GONE!
His best guess was that it was lost at sea… a casualty of playing football on a sandbar, 20-30 feet off the beach. He emailed us a map outlining where he thought it might be, and when the wind and tide were right, I drove out to the island and got to work.
Hours of thoroughly searching the area, in knee-to-waist-deep water, turned up nothing but junk. But, I wasn’t about to give up and returned to give it another go, finding it in the dip between the beach and the sandbar.
Funny thing is, when it happens… when you find yourself staring down into your scoop at that ring… time tends to stop in it’s tracks! You blink a lot, as if to make sure your eyes are working right, and then you just stand there for a minute, in awe.
Minutes later, I’m on the phone for the best part of all… Mike’s reaction when I tell him, “I found your ring”!
The inscription: Love Always, Erika!
(This was my favorite wet find of 2010… 2011 & 2012 will follow.)