Santosh called me for help searching for his fiance’s lost engagement ring which fell off her hand from a third story apartment into what Santosh suspected was the bushes below. The area to search was quite small and we set a date to give it a shot.
When I arrived Santosh and his fiance showed me the area which was quite confined but covered in brush and had a wall of bushy vines behind it hanging on a metal trellis. They described hearing the ring bounce once off their downstairs neighbor’s balcony railing and not hearing it again. I began searching the area and it quickly became clear that there was a lot of trash in the spot and it was going to be difficult to isolate any small ring-like signals. I needed to slow way down and even run a discrimination pattern to try to cut out some of the trash signals. I did isolate and dig a couple of targets but was not having any luck. We tried several different methods both with metal detector and just a pinpointer, digging everything out of the area that we could find. I also searched the bushes on the wall behind the area they suspected their ring was.
Finally after about an hour and a half of this I asked whether they had searched their neighbor’s patio. It turns out they did in fact search that patio so I asked if it was possible that the ring could be in some other area than where we were searching, perhaps still somewhere on the other patio. I explained that in this confined of a space and with this much time and effort it was really starting to feel like the ring was not in the area we were searching.
Eventually after trying a bit more we agreed that it would be wise for them to check other locations, especially their neighbor’s patio again, and that if the ring did not turn up that I would be glad to come back the following week and try again.
Several days later I received a text from Santosh who said that they did in fact check with their neighbor again and found it sitting right on the patio in an area that they did not previously look! Sometimes thoroughly ruling out one area can be valuable enough information that it eventually leads to a find.
