Uncategorized Category | Page 405 of 497 | The Ring Finders

Kim and Mark were taking the dog for a swim in Smiths Lake on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Australia when Mark noticed that his wedding ring wasn’t where it should have been.

An hour and a half of searching and the ring was still hiding. A helpful local suggested giving me a call and luckily I was only an hour away.

A twenty minute search in two feet of clear water with a sandy sea bed (how rare are those ones) and the Excalibur II yelled at me.

A short time sifting through the sand and I felt the unmistakable shape of a ring, which I re-burried in the sand marking the spot with a plastic tent peg. I suggested to Mark that he  might like to feel around near the tent peg and a short time later he jumped up holding his wedding ring. Lots of smiles and some photos and another happy client.

Thank you to the random stranger who recommended The Ringfinders. 

Matt and some of his friends were tailgating before the college game and throwing a football around for entertainment.  To keep from losing it while throwing, Matt took his ring off his throwing hand and put it on his other hand for safe-keeping.  About twenty minutes later he noticed the ring was missing.  His buddy, Derek, got on the internet and posted for help in finding Matt’s ring.

So fellow ringfinder Gregg Larabel and I visited the college campus site and got permission from the campus police to hunt for the ring.  But we found the area so littered in metal trash (lots of bottle caps and pull tabs) that it was really time consuming to hunt.  We spent about an hour, but because of other commitments we had to leave before finding the ring.  Three days later I went back to the site and set up a grid of strings across the area and started a thorough search.  A groundskeeper came by and told me that for about ten years people have been parking their cars on the grass and partying before the football games.   Ten years!  Now I understood all the trash.

With the metal detector beeping almost constantly on those bottle caps, I lucked out and spotted the ring lying in the grass.   Nobody had stepped on it and pushed it into the dirt.  I gave Derek a call and texted him pictures of the ring.  He gave me an address to drop the ring off to a friend that lives on campus and said he would send me a picture of Matt with his ring back on his finger.  Congrats to Matt. I hope he is out of the doghouse now!

Newly-married, Germantown resident, Gary Tanker, finished cutting his grass and was washing up at his kitchen sink when he realized his tantalum wedding band was missing! Wikipedia describes tantalum as “a rare, hard, blue-gray, lustrous transition metal that is highly corrosion-resistant.” Only very recently has this metal been used for making jewelry. Despite my nearly 40+ years experience, this was my first search for a ring made from this rare metal; I was unsure just where on the conductivity scale my XP Deus detector would register tantalum. In addition, Gary’s home sat on a half-acre lot—where would we begin?

Gary had spent every spare moment on his knees combing through the grass and leaves. He even used a simple metal detector acquired and used as a child—all without success; the ground, to his dismay, was full of metal! It was then he discovered The Ring Finders Internet directory of metal-detecting specialists and reached out to me. I was out of the country at the time but we arranged to meet soon after my arrival home.

When I finally pulled up at the Tanker residence, the sun had fully set. Temperatures were plummeting and strong winter-like winds bit through our clothes. With flashlights in hand we began a systematic search. Metal detecting, in its simplest form is a process of eliminating where the lost item is not. And in the case of a wedding ring, this involves eliminating one square inch at a time.

After nearly two hours we moved our search to the rear of the house where I remembered Gary explaining how he had brushed aside low branches of an apple tree while operating his lawn tractor. It made sense to first check out where those branches may have caught his ring. It was the right decision. Within moments a pronounced signal in the high sliver range registered on my detector. The clear outline of Gary’s ring became visible after sweeping away some grass and leaves. I gave Gary the thrill of extracting his ring from where it lay pressed deeply into the ground.

So glad for the opportunity to help recover your tantalum ring, Gary!

Nicholus Hockers felt the heavy platinum ring leave his finger as he swam to his family’s boat dock on a warm summer evening on Silver Lake, Wisconsin. His heart sank to the muddy depths along with the cherished token. He had only received it from his bride a few weeks before. Now it was gone. How could he face her with such news!

I received phone call from Nicholus a few days later on August 26, 2016. He discovered The Ring Finders website and saw my name listed as a metal-detecting specialist in the area. Could I perform a search for his ring?

Most Wisconsin lakes are shallow but have a pudding like bottom into which objects disappear, never to see the light of day again. But Nicholus’s description gave me confidence that he knew quite precisely where the ring had left his finger. It was a long-shot but worth a try.

My wife, Kathleen, and I arrived at Silver Lake late in the afternoon. I use a Minelab Excalibur, an underwater detector used by SCUBA divers around the world. It has served me well for a number of years and was my machine of choice for this search. I needed every advantage.

The bottom of the lake fell off sharply at the point where Nicholus felt the ring leave his finger. This meant working in chin deep water. The remains of what seemed to be an old cast-iron pipe in the same vicinity interfered with other signals. But after about a half hour of searching, the ring appeared in my sieve amidst a cluster of shells, mud and roots. Mission accomplished!

Thanks, Nicholus, for the opportunity to recover your ring. May its story continue for many, many happy years together!

A family photo session at the historical Covered Bridge Park near Cedarburg, Wisconsin ended on a frantic note when Shannon Lennox discovered that his wedding ring was missing. The park is a big place! The ring could have fallen off anywhere, including the river over which they had walked on a bridge with their busy children in tow.

I met up with Shannon late in the afternoon of October 18th. A preliminary search in the areas where he and his family had posed for the photographer failed to locate the lost ring. By this time it was dark and Shannon drove home to put his children to bed. I continued for a few more hours searching perimeter areas not previously covered. One location was particularly inundated with metal trash, making the cacophony of signals almost impossible to decipher. This and the taller grass combined to militate against technology and my best efforts.

Finally, I tried one more adjustment, that of reducing my XP Deus detector’s sensitivity by nearly half and by sweeping the detectors coil higher than usual over the grass. This eliminated most of the buried trash signals and allowed only those objects on the surface to register. It wasn’t long before a clear gold-ring number shone through the darkness. Carefully dividing the grass beneath revealed the gold wedding band, complete with its ‘ROMANS 12’ biblical inscription, a life chapter that serves to guide Shannon’s Christian life as a husband, father and friend.

The twins were not yet settled when I rang Shannon’s doorbell a short while later. Wide-eyed disbelief was written all over his face when I presented him with his cherished ring. Such moments have always been my favorite!

Vicky* heard the earing as it landed on the family’s boat dock. Then there was silence. The sickening realization that her earing was now at the bottom of Big Cedar Lake prompted a frantic search for her prized gold and silver jewelry piece. She knew it couldn’t have gone far but all efforts to retrieve it from the lake bottom proved fruitless.

I received a call from Vicky who subsequently discovered The Ring Finders directory on the Internet. Soon, my wife, Kathleen and I were on our way to Big Cedar Lake and to Vicky’s lovely home. She accompanied us to the dock and described the moments when she felt the earing drop.

Before entering the Lake, I carefully scanned the bottom with an underwater detector made by an Australian company, Minelab. The Excalibur, as it is called, is the tool of choice for many SCUBA divers worldwide. Detecting from the dock helped not to disturb the bottom unnecessarily. Almost immediately, a promising signal came from a location barely a meter out from the dock. Within minutes, the signal proved to be that of Vicky’s earing!

* Vicky, not her real name, preferred not to be identified or to have her photo published.