Lost Platinum Wedding Rings in Surf While Grunion Hunting .. Newport Beach, CA.
Max and Cherry had read online about how to hunt for grunion on Southern California beaches. Grunions are small sardine sized fish that come up in the surf at nighttime high tide to lay their eggs in wet sand. A lot people think grunion hunting is a hoax. ( google search )
Max thought he should hold both his and Cherry’s platinum wedding rings for safe keeping. Both rings stayed on finger most the evening until he went to rinse the sand off his hands in the surf. He shook his wet hands off and both platinum rings went into to water.
Max called me and we met at the beach the next morning, eight hours after the loss happened. This could be easy if he could get me to the general location. At first Max was not quite sure of where they had been as it was dark when the arrived at the beach that evening.
As I started to grid search the high tide wet beach, after 20 minutes, Max came up to me suggesting that it may be the closer to the next lifeguard tower south. No problem, I could always return to the area I was grinding.
General location is the key word, within about fifteen minutes I got the first signal and recovered the first ring. Then it was a mater of a few more swings of my search coil the other ring sounded off in my headphones. I marked a spot in the wet sand and asked Max to dig it by hand because I knew it was less than 3” deep. He had fun retrieving his own ring and both Max and Cherry were very excited and happy to have their wedding rings back They have only been married one month. So this wouldn’t have been a good way to start their marriage off.
Received a call from a young man who was helping an elderly women. The gentleman was sitting on a bench at Loyola Beach with his girlfriend when he observed an elderly women frantically searching on her hands and knees for her sentimental engagement ring in the sand. It was yellow gold with two Diamonds and a Ruby. He helped her by marking the spot with some small stones and a buried t shirt. He went online with his phone and found the Ringfinders website and my name. The woman does not own a cell phone. He called me and explained the situation. This call was received in the late afternoon today. I knew that if I didn’t come out right away, the stones and marker would probably be gone in the morning because of the raking machines they use every morning on the beaches. He gave me the woman’s landline number and we met at the beach. The marker was still intact. In less than 30 seconds, with just 1 swipe of the coil, I found the ring less than a foot from the marker. It came up as 12/05 on my CTX 3030. The woman was in shock that I was able to find it. She had already given up any hope of finding it. People nearby saw that I had found it and came running over in disbelief. Another GREAT DAY to be a RINGFINDER!! I couldn’t have been happier for her so I had my picture taken with her.
