On a family trip five years and one day after Josh and Christine were married, Josh’s platinum wedding ring slipped off his finger in knee-deep water at Pilot Beach on the mid north coast of New South Wales in Australia.
Christine’s email arrived in my inbox four days later closely followed by that “it’s on” feeling I’m sure we all experience at the start of a search.
Pilot Beach is about a ninety minute drive north from my home and it is probably best described as a semi-surf beach lying inside two break walls at the mouth of the Camden Haven River.
After speaking to Christine and gathering information on the time of loss, surf conditions, tide height and the arrival of Google Earth photos of the location and several family photos from the day we set off to search for the ring. Christine expressed gratitude that someone would drop everything and head out looking for something for a total stranger and I suspect that she was not overly hopeful that the mission would be a successful one.
Searching for lost items with no direct contact with the owner can be difficult and Christine was speaking to me from Sydney but her photos and maps and the accuracy of her memory of the location that became apparent on arrival at the search area provided the confidence I needed.
With the search area pegged out from the maps and photos I went to work with my Minelab Excalibur. Encouragingly there were few signals from the detector in the upper sector of the search area and with one possible target marked in the mid sector in about a foot of water. Digging here was futile as the surf returned most of the sand dug right back into the hole so I completed the lower sector in waist deep water as the tide dropped locating one bottle top for the rubbish bin.
A few minutes of careful digging and scanning back at the marked signal uncovered a platinum ring with the inscription confirming that it was the target ring approximately one foot from the surface of the sand. A quick message to Christine on the phone while dodging the beginning of a thunder storm saw us back in the car for the return journey. Mission accomplished thanks to The Ring Finder
Nick
Well done! Surf hunts can be very difficult. It always amazes me how deep jewelry can sink in such a short period of time.
Thanks Mark, me too… I suspect that it’s a surface area to weight thing. Finds in the surf are always more satisfying partially because they are always a long shot particularly four days after the loss. Keeping the “it has to be here somewhere” idea in your head is the key I think.
Nick
Dear Nick,
it’s been four weeks now since your fabulous work to get Josh’s wedding ring back.
We are still very very grateful and happy, and can’t believe how friendly, helpful and SUCCESSFUL you were! It’s just unbelievable that you dropped everything to drive 1.5h North, to wade through the surf on a stormy day to help us out. I don’t think you mentioned in your post that it was less than eight hours between my first email to you, and the photo I have since been told that the likelihood of finding a ring in the surf more than a day after it was lost is less than 20% – you’ve proven the statistics wrong. YAY 🙂
Hope all is well!