We got a text from Alan on a Saturday afternoon asking if we could come out to his 5-acre farm in Washougal, WA, to help locate his lost wedding ring. Alan had been planting some trees on his property when he lost his rose gold wedding band.
The beautiful rose gold band isn’t perfectly round. It’s almost square-shaped with rounded corners, and because of that, it had a tendency to slip off his finger whenever he pulled his thick leather work gloves off.
Alan told me that he had actually thought he lost his slightly oversized ring once before while working outside, only to find it wedged perfectly upright inside the ring finger of his left-hand glove. He made a mental note from then on to leave his wedding ring inside while he was working, but on this particular day, he forgot to take it off.
My wife and I showed up at his beautiful farm the next day with two metal detectors. My wife was running her Nokta Legend, and I was running my Minelab Manticore.
Alan showed us three areas of the property where he believed the ring could have been lost. He said he had removed his gloves multiple times that day, and he believed that one of those times the ring must have slipped off his finger as he pulled the glove off.
My wife and I started gridding the two areas near the freshly planted trees. Apart from finding some old buried beer cans and a ton of iron signals, however, the ring was nowhere to be found.
We had one more area to search—the section of gravel driveway where Alan parks his tractor every night.
We searched all around the tractor, but still had no luck.
Just as we were getting ready to head back out into the field to re-grid the area, I noticed Alan’s leather work gloves sitting on the floorboard of the tractor.
I picked up the gloves and gave them a good shake, just in case, but nothing came out. I tossed the gloves on the ground in front of me and decided to run my Manticore over them, just to make absolutely sure nothing was stuck inside.
When I passed over the right glove, the detector stayed completely silent.
But as soon as I passed over the left glove, I got a clean, crisp, LOUD signal.
I reached down, picked up the glove, and started massaging each finger, feeling around for whatever metal was setting off the detector.
Sure enough, buried deep inside the fingertip of the pointer finger of the left glove was a hard, round object.
I had to really work at getting the object out because it was jammed tightly inside the finger of the glove. But after a few seconds of working it loose, Alan’s beautiful rose gold wedding ring finally slid out into my hand.
The ring had been hiding in the glove the entire time.
Another successful recovery alongside my wonderful wife—and another very happy customer!
Sometimes the best signals aren’t buried in the ground at all. ❤️💍
