Gold/Platinum Wedding Band Found Just In Time In Santa Cruz

The happy couple and an equally stoked Ring Finder

The quarry

I recieved a call yesterday evening from a gentleman who had lost his wedding band, apparently while gardening earlier that day. From his brief description of the circumstances surrounding the loss it appeared this was definitely findable and could possibly even be an easy hunt. If I’ve learned one thing though after ringhunting for awhile now its that you never go off of first impressions from descriptions over the phone. This proved true once again on this search. I arrived to find two irregularly shaped areas and one long narrow area as the possible locations of the lost ring. The areas contained a multitude of physical as well as metallic obstacles to contend with. The two irregular areas had deep tree roots, a water meter box as well as deep plants and shrubs bordering it. The straight narrow path had gopher cages, vent screens and multiple other metal objects that would make searching it very difficult to do thoroughly.  On top of that the owner had been battling some tenacious weeds deep into some muddy ground so this ring was possibly substantially deeper than most recent surface drops, that would add another difficult dimension to this search. I grabbed my White’s MXT Pro and hooked up my elliptical 6×10 DD coil. I knew the signal/search characteristics as well as the physical shape (oval) of this coil would make it the best suited choice for this location. It wouldn’t let me down. I searched all the areas as thoroughly as possible and, except for a few pieces of “trash” . . nothing. I was going to switch to a bigger coil but, following the first rule in searching I decided to go over the areas once more but from a different direction. I put my coil down right adjacent to the water meter box and got a partial hit. After maneuvering my coil into the optimum position I was able to pull out a solid repeating signal of 24 on my meter . . 2″ down lay the ring. The first time I had checked that spot the large amount of metal in and around the water meter box had masked the ring with it’s overpowering signal. This time around, the new direction coupled with this coil’s particular characteristics gave me just enough to spot the elusive prey. Had the ring been a couple inches closer to the box this would’ve ended quite differently. After reuniting the extremely happy couple with their treasured item they informed me that their 10th wedding anniversary is this month and they were preparing to buy him a replacement. Three extremely happy people stood in the warm Santa Cruz sunshine, happy there was no need for that now.

In time for the upcoming 10th anniversary