About 2 weeks ago I received a text from a fellow Western New Yorker who was in need of the Ring Finder’s. The target wasn’t a ring but an earing.
The text went on to describe a soccer game that his daughter played in, in the foothills of the Allegany Range, just north-east of Olean, NY. Before the game, a very precious and sentimental earing was removed and handed to Dad so it wouldn’t be lost during the game. ( I am sure for safety reason too…). After the game, Dad meet his daughter on the center-line stripe about halfway between the bottom of the circle and the sideline to assist in making sure the earing returned to its rightful spot. Unfortunately his hand was bumped during this attempt and the Allegany Mountains claimed gold.
I started the 90 minute trip to the soccer field around 8 AM Sunday morning. Moderate fog blanketed the foothills making the narrow wooded roads a fun and sort of mysterious journey. As I started the search the fog was still thick enough to obscure the beauty of the foothills surrounding me. I set up a search grid based on the field markings and the great map that was provided to me of what would be an 80 x 40 foot search area.
After just a few minutes it became clear to me that this field had never been detected before or at least hadn’t been in a long time. Coin targets everywhere! Staying focused I only checked ultra shallow targets by setting my Garrett AT Pro metal detector to max sensitivity, to find a tiny earing, and setting the pin-pointer to the shallowest setting to check the depth of the target as to spend time only on the shallow targets.
My first pass up and down the center line yielded lots of foil items and some surface coins, no doubt, from the most recent events on the field. I expanded my grid out to about 20 feet to each side of the centerline. I reversed my direction and re-searched this area for a second time but from the opposite direction. With no positive result I searched the entire area a third time but perpendicular to the first two searches. This change did help to uncover more signals, but unfortunately, not the earing.
After about 4 1/2 hours, and several tweaks of the metal detector, I was not able to recover the earing. I knew this was a tall task when I agreed to take on the search, but that is inconsequential to the prospect of not trying to help. While this may not be a “successful” recovery it shows that the Ring Finders will take on nearly any recovery mission, after all its returning irreplaceable items to their owner that is the greatest reward.
