Alvintae “Kirk” texted me on Sunday afternoon (June 14, 2026) stating he lost a yellow gold pinky ring with an eagle (not quite a needle, but close, lol) while laying hay in his raised garden beds at his home in Hillsboro, Alabama. Kirk recently lost some weight, and the ring was fitting him loosely. This ring was very sentimental to Kirk because it was given to him by his late uncle about a year prior. Our schedules didn’t line up until Friday, so we set up a search for that morning.
I made the very beautiful and peaceful 55-minute drive to Hillsboro on Friday morning. After meeting Kirk, I had him walk me through the whole scenario and asked some clarifying questions. Kirk really felt like his ring fell off into the first of four raised garden beds. Unfortunately, the raised beds were made out of a thick galvanized steel that rang in around the gold range on my metal detector. Even turning down the sensitivity didn’t get me as close as I wanted to the sides. I also checked if I could discriminate out the metal (even though it was reading as non-ferrous) with my Nokta AccuPOINT pinpointer, but that didn’t work.
I asked Kirk to pull out the hay that was on top of the wood logs in the beds. I would scan the hay piles with my Equinox Minelab 900 as he pulled it out. Kirk got about ¾ of it out and I went back and scanned over the wood logs that were inside the beds, but I was still getting interference from the steel sides. We decided to move the entire bed frame siding out of the way, so that I could get an accurate and unmasked reading. We carefully moved the bed so that we didn’t damage a pretty plant that Kirk’s wife really likes. As I was detecting over the back part of the remaining hay in the bed area, I received a good, repeatable 25-27 on my Nox. I told Kirk that this was a very promising tone. I walked over and took out my Garrett “carrot” pinpointer to narrow down the area. I got the tone and gently brushed the hay away and there was that glimmer of gold-on-gold staring back at us! We both let out some shouts of joy and immediately thanked the good Lord. Kirk was so excited, relieved, and thankful that his uncle’s ring was found.
We took some photos and chatted for a few minutes before I was back on the road, headed home to Huntsville. I’m truly blessed that I get to be a blessing to others. Until the next one, please take care and God bless…
Nick contacted me and said that his wife had lost her wedding band while preparing a raised plant bed, but she wasn’t sure which one. He and his wife has a matching tungsten carbide band set. The first bed I checked had a good signal, but it turned out to be a larger deep signal. The second bed was larger in size, but all of them had galvanized metal sheeting for the side walls. That was a problem, but I managed to work around it. In the second bed I found a signal that was showing a 30 on the Manticore, but was close to the metal side wall so that number may have been skewed. That 30 on the Manticore turned out to be her ring. It was about four inches deep. The total seach time was only about twelve minutes.
