Lost Gold Wedding Ring Recovered, Weko Beach, Bridgman Michigan (Lake Mi)
06/25/2024 Weko Beach, Bridgman Michigan, Lake Michigan, water temp 68. William and family were enjoying the day at the beach. The 90’s temps last week warmed the big lake up nicely nearshore. At some point, William realized his gold wedding ring had fell off. He noticed this while out by a certain buoy marker out by the water inlet tower.
His daughter Alissa, later did some googling and came across my information as a “Ring Finder”. She texted me, we worked out the details and today (06/26) I did my searching, based off a hand drawn treasure-map of sorts.
There had been a quite strong wind/storm event later in the evening of the day of loss. Things move at this beach rather easily, even heavy 2-3 ounce fishing sinkers and massive amounts of sand come and go quickly.
Well, after a bit of searching, working the fairly large area, I got a nice sounding signal, told the gopro to “start recording”, took a careful scoop and observed a very gold men’s band in the scoop! He’s been wearing it since May of 2002 and I’m glad to have helped recover it for them.
I was at a family picnic when I received a call from Anthony, stating that he had just lost his beautiful cross on the beach, somewhere in the area they were sitting. It was early afternoon and I told him I would be able to swing by soon, and to secure the area so nobody else came and setup their beach things in the exact same spot. Anthony assured me that was not a problem because they were there for the entire day, plus the fact he was very anxious to get his cross back where it belonged around his neck. We spoke about the events leading up to the mishap, that’s when he told me about the big creator he and his friends had dug that day in the sand where they were sitting. He said they had all been digging around looking for the cross for quite a while, but were positive it must be there somewhere, because he had spent the best part of the morning there, digging. It was then I asked them to please stop digging otherwise the cross may get buried to deep for my machine to pick it up. When I arrived I could see the creator from the dune walkover, and it was pretty big. Sure enough, it was close to 4′ deep, and roughly 6′ in circumference. I hopped in, scanned the entire bottom and the walls, without even a squeak of a sound from my metal detector. Next, I scanned the piles of sand they had pulled out of the hole with no luck either. I asked them to pull the piles down lower, to an average of no more than 10″ higher than the regular beach level. Once again, no luck anywhere, so only one more place to look was the bottom, after they pulled about 10″ of sand out. Now, with all the sand moving, I assured that the cross was positively NOT in, or anywhere around the crater. So, back to the drawing board, where he mentioned they were tossing a football on the tide line earlier, and that his friend did tackle him there. I told him I really wish he mentioned that earlier, as the tide had been rising very quickly. Once he showed me the area, the cross was in my scoop within 2 minutes. If Anthony told me that one detail of the day, my search would have started there, and all the sand moving could have been eliminated. Lost of detective work is needed to rescue items from their hiding places.
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.
