Trip’s Mother came to town for Thanksgiving and presented Trip with her Father’s signet ring. Trip went to Coronado’s dog beach on Thanksgiving Day to give his dog some exercise, and while throwing a ball out into the water, the priceless heirloom flew off with one of his throws. I got the call later that day, but, the tide was already coming in, so, not a good time to hunt for it. We made arrangements to meet on Saturday afternoon to take advantage of a nice low tide. I met trip there at the beach where he showed me the search area…..about the size of two football fields. He was to take his Mom back to the airport that afternoon, so, he took off and left me to my task. I started gridding parallel to the water’s edge from mid-slope heading toward the water as I chased the tide out. After about an hour, I covered all the wet sand down to the water and decided to start gridding the other direction 90 degrees from the previous grid. This way, I could see my grid marks better and not leave any gaps from the surf washing away my marks. After a dozen or so passes from mid-slope to knee deep water, I get a great hit in ankle deep water…..reading 12-29 on my E-trac. Sure enough, I pull up a big gold ring matching Trip’s description. I make the fun call and find Trip and Mother are heading toward the airport. Both are very happy to hear the good news and Trip said he would return to the beach in 20 minutes or so. I cooled my heels while I waited by doing some more detecting until he got there. Right on time, I looked up and saw the happiest person on the beach! Trip came walking down with the biggest smile you could imagine. We took some photos and made it out in time to miss the coming rain storm. A pleasure to meet you Trip and thank you for the reward!
Mark nailed it in his post. But the back story is pretty good, too. Dejected when discovering that I had lost the ring, I and my mother considered it as good as gone. My sister and her boyfriend did not. They looked up the Ring Finders, and after getting off the phone with Mark, they told me that I should give him a shot, if only because “that guy Mark sounded pretty darned confident that he could find it” despite me lobbing tennis balls to my water addicted Labrador 50 yards into the surf as far as I could throw. Thank goodness I gave him a shot. It made our whole holiday when the call came in. Thank you Mark!!!