Lost Keys … 1000 Steps Beach, Laguna Beach, CA. … Found in Sand
I got a call from Peyton’s grandfather who had found my number on The RingFinders website. He asked me if I could help them find a special set of keys that were lost on the beach two nights before. I was only a few minutes drive from 1000 Steps Beach, So. Laguna Beach, which is a beautiful beach and it would be nice place to search. The call came at 2pm and I met Peyton with his friends at 3:30pm. This beach is more or less isolated and there are not many guys detecting on a daily basis, also they do not use a beach cleaning machine on this beach. All these factors were a plus, to make this search successful..
Peyton is vacationing in Laguna Beach with his friends and were on the beach late at night when he decided to take a swim. He had these keys on a lanyard around his neck so he took it off so he wouldn’t lose them in the water. He laid the keys with his clothes at the crest of the beach. The tide was lower at this time of night. After swimming he put on his clothes and forgot about the keys until a few hours later. He a his friends spent the next morning and two more days looking for the keys and it should of been easy with the lanyard, but it was not easy.
After hearing his story of how he lost the keys and Peyton showing the general location. I started a spiral type grid search from top of beach to the surf. The tide had come over this crest of the beach several times over the past few days and I thought the wave action could have pulled the keys with the lanyard down into the surf. The other possibility is the waves could have pushed the keys further over the crest of the beach onto what we call the towel line. It took about 25 minutes and I probably made 7 or 8 passes of 40 feet, when I got the 12-33 reading and a strong audio signal on my Minelab CTX 3030 metal detector. The keys were under 10 inches of soft fluffy sand that had been pushed up by the 6 ft. plus tides of the past two days. It is not an exact science knowing what the surf does with the sand. One day it pushes the sand in and the next day it takes the sand away from the beach. It has to be good enough just to know that beach erosion works both ways and plan accordingly.
Peyton had been disapointed with himself for losing the keys, but now he was very happy to have these special keys back in his possession. I got the pleasure of helping him find the keys and search on a beautiful beach. The walk back to my car was only 200 steps up to Pacific Coast Hwy. ( not 1000 steps )
