Lost Gold Bangle at Tokerau, Found with Metal Detector
Cayla was enjoying the summer playing with her young daughter in the shallows at Tokerau Beach, soon realising that the special gold bangle had slipped off her toddlers wrist.
Her partner did all the right things by marking above the high tide mark where they were on the beach and called me straight away, time is always against us with ocean recoveries…
As soon as I got his message I gave my apologies to family, loaded the kit in the car and headed off on the 90km drive to Doubtless Bay.
We arrived at the beach only to find that out of the available 13km of beach, a family had parked a half dozen utes right on top of ground zero. Cayla persuaded them to relocate one of them in a prime area so I could search.
A few false starts with beer can pull tabs and a couple of longline fishing traces (removing several hooks out of the sand in the process) and I had reached the utes.
I changed the direction of the grid to start working parallel to the vehicles to maximise coverage before we needed to ask a little firmer if they wouldn’t mind shuffling along a bit. On the first run at the outer line of the first pattern, I got a clear and shallow signal.
My fingers dipped into the wet sand and lifted the tiniest most delicate gold bracelet.
I turned and held it up to Cayla and Scott who were a few metres away, smiles all round.
