Man’s Tungsten Wedding Band Lost in the Sand, Found and Returned Myrtle Beach SC
On Saturday, June 15th at about 1:45 pm, I received a text message from Haley saying, “Hey I was wondering if you could help me. My husband lost his wedding band at Myrtle Beach while we were there. We know around what place he lost it on the beach, but we don’t have a metal detector and are actually home from vacation now.” I asked her to call me so I could get the details of when, where and how. During the phone call she told me the hotel they were staying at, the day it was lost and that it was lost in the dry sand. She was one of five calls I had for the day, but number two on the list due to the location. After a successful recovery and return in Wrightsville Beach NC I headed 80 plus miles to the address she gave me in Myrtle Beach, SC. She had also sent me a few pictures of the hotel. When I arrived, I started a grid search from the south end of the hotel working my way north. About halfway through the search I called her to verify about where behind the hotel they were sitting. She told me they were closer to the north end, which was good because I hadn’t gotten that far yet. Unfortunately, there was a lot of trash, coins and junk in the dry sand that took up a lot of extra time digging. Finally, I got a solid 10 VDI (visual display indication) on the Nox 800. Lower than what I expected for a tungsten ring but possible depending on the size of the ring. I dug the shallow target and bingo! I checked the engraving, both on the inside and outside and had a match from what Haley had told me. I took a quick picture and text it to her. She responded almost immediately saying “That’s it.” She called me and I got her address and told her I stick it in the mail Monday.
Fast forward to Thursday June 20th and I got notification through tracking that the ring was delivered to the PO Box. I text Haley and she was going to check and see if it showed up. She responded that she had gotten a yellow slip in the box, but she’d have to wait until the next day to pick it up. Today, Friday, she text me saying “I got the ring, and I will get a picture of me and Jake with it whenever he gets home from work.” A few hours later, I got a great picture of the happy couple holding Jacob’s ring.
Haley and Jacob – Thank you for trusting me to help find and return you precious treasure. Take care of each other!
Jim
Eileen called just as I had gotten out of the dentists office, wondering if it would be possible to come and search for her I-Phone that slid off the roof of a car, and landed somewhere alongside the roadway. She explained that she had put the phone on the roof of the car, and said goodbye to her company. Forgetting the phone was on the roof she went inside, and her company drove off. The following day she realized the phone was missing, and realized what had happened. She contacted her friend hoping he had picked it up prior to leaving the night before, which wasn’t the case. They had finally decided it must have slid off the car roof and landed somewhere on the side of the road. Using the find my phone app. they found the last known location of the phone before it died, where they searched for 4 days without any luck. That was when she decided to call in a professional recovery expert. We made arrangements to meet on the side of the roadway that afternoon. It was there Eileen went into more detail about HOW important this phone was, as nothing was backed up to the cloud, including over 6000 pictures, that were absolutely unreplaceable. This area was right in front of a big housing complex, that had manicured grounds with fences and pristine walking paths. I was praying it didn’t fall off there as the grass cutters had recently cut the lawn, and it would have shredded it to bits, had they ran it over. I instructed Eileen to go into the management office, explain what happened, and ask if possibly the phone was turned in. While she was in doing that I covered the entire area on both sides of the road, and all the landscape, with no luck, just as I had figured. Standing back, looking in the opposite direction, the curve in the road looked ever so inviting of an area, for a phone to slide off the roof. I walked back covering everything from the road in about 10′ with no luck. Then I turned around and continued back along the tall weeds, and wood line. Right along the weeds, just inside of where the mowers cut, I received the loudest broken signal from my metal detector, that I know ever to familiar, would be her cell phone. Sure enough BINGO!!!! I had her phone. I decided to record the moment when I returned her it, and needless to say, what a heart filled experience it was, reuniting Eileen with over 6000 photos, which covered many years of her life prior, to this almost tragic mishap.
If you didn’t have a chance to read the original story, Jennifer had lost 2 ring in the water where they dock their boat. I recovered the one ring (wedding band) on the first trip, but the beautiful family heirloom diamond ring was hiding on the muddy bottom, in a location that my metal detector had not yet covered. It was getting late so I packed it in for the day and promised I would return after vacation in a few weeks. It was a safe location, otherwise I would have never postponed looking for the second ring. We made arrangements as I usually do prior to showing up, and quickly got to work upon my arrival. I decided to use my other machine with the 6′ coil, as the target location is a much more concentrated location. The reason for that was because marina locations tend to be very trashy, due to the fact that once an item is dropped into the water, its usually forgotten about. The larger coil I had used on the first recovery attempt was picking up to many signals at one time, therefore the beautiful filigree diamond ring was getting overpowered by other metallic items on the bottom. WELL, that was obviously a good idea because I had Jennifer’s ring in my scoop in under 5 minutes.
