Lost Ring playing soccer... Cherry Park - Lake Forest, Calif. .. Found in Grass

Saturday  Sept. 28, 2013

I had just parked at a beach in Laguna and was getting ready to do a little metal detecting.  I got a call from Daniel, he was in a park in Lake Forest which is about 10 miles inland.  He told me he had just lost his ring while playing soccer. This sounded like an easy search so I asked him if he could stay in the location and I would be there in 45 minutes. When I arrived Daniel showed me the exact place he was standing when he blocked a ball that came at him.  This really sounded like it was going to be a quick recovery.  I started about 20 ft.  back from that location to begin my grid search. Daniel was familiar with metal detectors because he had used them while in the military. I started showing him how good my detector could separate different targets and identify quarters from pennies, etc. Also I could tell how deep things were eliminating a lot of work stopping and checking deep signals. Even with all this advantage I was unable to find Daniel’s  tungsten wedding band.  He was super positive that the ring flew off his finger in this 10 ft. square area. I probably cross gridded it 4 or 5 times.  I spent a total of 2 hrs. searching the rest of that end I’d the field till dark. Then  I had to admit I could not find it.  Parks are not the easiest searches because there is a lot of trash metal. If you want to make yourself crazy rent a metal detector and go try to use it in a park.

I went back to try the search for a second time after about 12 days.  I had thought about Daniel’s lost ring several times wondering what I had done wrong. Chris Turner often says it’s a game of inches and I agree. This time I took a another tungsten ring to get an accurate ID reading from my Minelab CTX 3030 metal detector. I had planned to set up my grid to cover the whole soccer goalie  area and places he may have chased the ball.  After the first 15 minutes it started to rain, the first rain in So. Calif. that we have had for 7 months. I went to my truck to get rain gear because I wanted to give this my last try.  It took about an hour and a half then I found the ring. It was more than 20 ft. from where Daniel had blocked the ball. Here’s the best part of the story. It was actually within the first couple feet where I started the search the week before. I believe that I probably wasn’t paying attention to my detector when I was bragging to Daniel about how good my expensive detector was.  

I had not told Daniel that I would return to search for his ring. After finding his ring I sent him  a photo of his ring and he called me back excited. He and his wife had already been researching the purchase of a new ring. We made arrangements to meet up the next weekend when he gets back in the area. Besides being able to return the ring, this was definitely a humbling experience and I’m learning more with each search.