Uncategorized Category | Page 422 of 584 | The Ring Finders

Tony and family went for a late night cruise on their pontoon boat and shorty after getting home Tony noticed his wedding band was missing.  This morning he and his wife, Valerie, were trying to figure out where he could have lost it.  He remembered tripping over a cooler sitting on the floor of the pontoon boat, and catching himself by pushing his hand thru the opening between the seats and the overhead canopy.  When checking this spot on the boat he noticed the zipper was slightly open: he guessed that this is where he lost the ring.  Straight down from that location is 4 ft of water.  Valerie got on the internet and found Ringfinders and by 2:00PM today Gregg Larabel and I were out there.  I donned my waders and immediately got a good signal right under that zipper on the boat.  A couple of scoops later and the big beautiful ring turned up in my scoop.  For the rest of the story: Valerie said this ring is Tony’s fourth since they have been married and he lost one of them in Gun Lake years ago.  Tony is going to give us an exact location on a google map and hopefully we can find that ring for him too.

It was like searching for a proverbial needle in a haystack. But instead of a needle, it was an engraved platinum wedding ring belonging to Oconomowoc, WI resident Steve Nichols. And instead of a haystack, it was a colossal mound of clippings at The Town Yard and Waste Recycling Center.

The ring flew off Steve’s hand and vanished into the mound late Saturday afternoon as he was emptying his pickup truck of yard waste. Despite 5 hours of sifting through all manner of vegetative debris, Steve, his wife, Anne, and friends were unable to locate the missing love token. Even with the use of a rented metal detector it could not be found. The detector emitted a cacophony of indistinguishable chirping sounds, which only added to the Nichols’ frustration.

The following morning, Steve and Anne returned to the mound and resumed their search; three discouraging hours later, no ring. That’s when Anne contacted a Wisconsin member of The Ring Finders Directory, Dan Roekle, who in turn pointed her to me since I lived closer.

I made arrangements to meet with Steve and Anne on location. After showing me the sequence of events that led up to the ring’s loss, I began a search of the perimeter and surface area of the formidable mound. As I began to cover the area where the truck had been parked, a faint signal was heard which invited careful excavation of material. With each pass the audible signal increased and data, now visible on my XP Deus screen, was consistent with the denseness of platinum. Finally, the source of the signal proved to be none other than Steve’s ring!

The search took all of 15 minutes!

Thanks Steve and Anne, for the joy and privilege of finding and returning your precious wedding ring. May its story (which now includes being buried and lost in a humongous pile of yard clippings and then beyond all odds found), continue for many, many happy years to come.

Mason and his family were at a bar-b-cue at a friend’s house in Hamburg,NJ.His Wife’s engagement ring was lost on the front lawn. At that point is was all hands on deck and he and his friends searched without finding the ring.
His friend had an entry level metal detector and they looked for the ring the next day without finding it again.
After locating me on the Ringfinders website we arranged to meet at the site.
They had a good idea of the area the Ring was lost in. I began my grid search of the lawn and found the ring after 45 minutes. His wife was certain she would never see the ring again, so you could imagine the joy its’ recovery caused the whole family. It is so satisfying to return a precious lost item to someone who has lost hope in ever seeing the item again. Like I told Mason at the start, “If the ring is here, I will find it !”

It was not my grandmother’s hearing aid. It was super small, no wires, Bluetooth enabled and lost.

It took two detectorists from TheRingFinders to locate a “lost” hearing aid, one that others had no luck in locating. Denis, Anne, neighbors, friends and even the sales person of the hearing aid did not eyeball the lost left hearing aid. Denis with his Bluetooth enabled hearing aid on had been out listening to The Beatles Here Comes The Sun while leaf blowing his front yard. After finishing up an early leaf fall and back in his house he noticed the left aid was missing. The noise from the leaf blower masked the missing music. With the aid of a new detector with a visual indication of the type of metals along with an audio sound, it took me about a half an hour to be fortune enough to hear the signal response of the aid’s battery among all the not so possible signal returns. With a bit of help from a flash light the hearing aid came into view among a bit of tall grass under which it had been hiding from other prying eyes. I surmised that a tree’s branch had brushed the hearing aid from Denis’s left ear which lead to the search. The initial request for help in finding the lost hearing aid came to me from J&E Metal Detectors. I was in the middle of having roof work done on my house and being unsure if I would be able to do a search before darkness fell, I called on Luke for a bit of assistance. As it turned out Luke and I showed up about two minutes apart. Many magnificent people all came together to help in the search and return. My hobby allows me to meet such wonderful people, and friendships I and others can count on in time of need.