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.
Last evening I was contacted concerning two lost rings. I met with Katie this morning at the site where she believed her rings were lost. It was a grass parking area. She had placed her rings in her pocket with her car keys and believed she lost the rings when she removed the keys. She was unsure exactly where that happened. We started where the car was parked. I double covered that area with my metal detector with no luck. The grass was patchy in that area but it was a parking area with the possibility that a tire had pushed them down. Next I started on the path she had taken to get to the parking area.. Which had more grass. I moved along,slowing down only when the grass was thick enough to hide a ring..In just a few minutes I got a good yet faint signal.It was the first of the two rings .. It was standing on edge! The very next swing got a second good signal … The second ring!
