Ring lost at Fiesta Island Found
Angie and Steve came to San Diego to enjoy a day at Fiesta Island and the Over-The-Line Tournament going on yesterday. Angie removed her beautiful engagement ring to apply some lotion, set the ring in her lap, and…..well, you can guess the rest. The ring ended up in the soft sand and disappeared from view. They and others around them tried to find the ring, but, to no avail. Some consultation with others, an online search, contact with fellow RingFinder Curtis Cox further north and his referral to me, got the ball rolling. They were still there at the site, so, I gathered my gear and headed out for the normally short 10 mile journey…..and a journey it was. It took an hour to get there, and parking was virtually non-existent. I managed to squeeze between two vehicles parked at the edge of the road (with just a couple of inches on each side to spare) and park down on the beach. A short hike to meet Steve, and an even shorter hike to the search area. This event has been going on here for decades and always draws a huge crowd. The search area was right next to one of the dozens of ball fields, where spectators have been dropping pull tabs, bottle caps, and other metal trash from day one. I expected this to take a while to sift through. Steve and Angie cleared the area of chairs and other items while I fired up the detector and donned my gear. Sure enough, all sorts of signals were hitting my ears with just the slightest movement of the coil. One nice strong 12 on my Equinox alerted me to a shallow target after only a minute or two. I zeroed in on the signal with my pin pointer and pulled Angie’s “precious” out into the sunlight again. Cheers went up all around the area, and a very happy Angie and Steve can now travel home in a much better frame of mind. A pleasure meeting you, thank you for the reward, and best wishes with your upcoming marriage.
Tess lost her absolutely beautiful wedding and engagement rings while vacationing at the beach. She and friends searched the beach for hours, sifting the sand with no success and it was getting dark. She called me at 9:30 that evening asking if I could help. After discussing details of when and where, it was the best guess than it was lost either on the sandy beach or in the water. I said I would help and I would be there at daylight. Tess met me just as the sun was up enough to see and reviewed the area to search. It was a fairly large area. I decided to search the beach first before lots of people showed up and before the umbrellas went up. The search took about 2 hours. When looking for a gold ring, depending on the metallurgy it could mimic just about any other commonly found metals. Because of that fact I had to dig every signal. I did lots of digging on that beach and did not find her ring. Next step was to search in the water. Fortunately there was not that many signals in the water. I think I dug about 10 targets before coming upon a weird signal, the target data kept jumping around suggesting a soda can but the signals could have been a gold too, so I started digging. Digging has to be done with care to avoid and damage to precious property. It took me three gentle scoops before the target was in my scoop. The entire time I was saying to myself this is a soda can, I know it’s a soda can, but knew I had to dig everything. To my amazement Tess’s cherished ring was there safe and sound. I learn something new just about every time I do a ring recovery, her ring was really three rings probably with different metallurgy!
