Danielle contacted me after losing her tiny gold and diamond earring at Little Cable Bay, between Mangonui and Taipa.
She had spent some considerable time looking for it, but in the dry sand a tiny earring that blended in perfectly would have been virtually invisible to the eye.
I wasn’t able to get away from work for a few hours, but in this instance it worked out well with the tides.
She had sent me a photo which showed some trees lined up as a reference, so I could make a start as soon as I got there.
It didn’t take long to locate myself in the right spot and I started work, a very tedious process with a lot of interference from metallic rubbish that saturated the dry sands above the high tide line.
Danielle arrived soon after and was able to give me her best guess as to where it might be.
With a high probability location now identified, I changed up a few settings and started listening for the tiniest wisp of gold in among all the can tabs and flakes of tinfoil.
It was hard mentally processing each individual signal, digging the probable signals and flagging the unlikely, but possibles to revisit later if necessary.
About 10 minutes in, with the coil running under the surface of the loose and fluid dry sand, I got a repeatable signal only just audible over nearby rubbish.
I ran my hand through the sand, nothing was seen and the pinpointer didn’t pick it up, but I had moved the target. Was it yet another tiniest fragment of ancient drink can?
Slowly I progressively eliminated ever smaller piles of sand until there was one small heap left.
I grabbed it and slowly opened out my hand, scrutinising the grains as they fell through the slightest gap between my fingers, until resting in my palm was the distinctive shape of an earring.
Danielles eyes lit up when she realised her precious lost earring had been found in amongst several trillion grains of sand.
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