Lost iPhone .. Venice Beach, CA. .. Found in Sand

Tuesday  April 28, 2015  .. 8am

Maria called me Tuesday morning asking for help to find her iphone that she lost in the sand Monday evening. She is from the Ukraine studying at Santa Monica college. Her phone contains a lot of information that is not backed up. She had been playing with her 2 sons very close to the Venice pier when the phone was lost. It is a high pedestrian traffic area making it possible that somebody had found it.
When I met Maria she told me that the phone had been found and turned into to main lifeguard headquarters. She was on her way to pick it up. I was glad that she would soon have it and all the important information it contained. She thanked me for coming. It is a beautiful day so I decided to do some detecting on this tourist beach before the sunbathers came out on the beach.
After about 30 minutes, Maria came walking up to me with a disappointing look on her face. The iphone at the lost and found was not her’s. We looked at the location that she thought it was lost. She pointed out an area about the size of basketball court. Part of it had been leveled out with a small beach tractor. I started at the lower end of where the tractor moved the sand. After two 30 foot passes with my CTX 3030 .. I got a signal that didn’t sound like anything very large, but that is normal for the CTX. I put my scoop into the dry sand gently as not to damage it. The first signal was Maria’s phone. You can see she was happy to have it back.
A bonus for the day was about two hours later when a older lady came up to me on the beach. She could not speak very good english, but I realized that she was Maria’s mother when she thanked me for finding her daughter’s iphone. Every search is different with different challenges. I love it.