Engagement Ring Lost for 4 months! – Pensacola Beach – FOUND!!!
I am so honored to be able to write up this story as one of the most amazing ring returns I have had with the Ringfinders. I warn you, it’s probably going to be a long one. 😃 2019 has been a great year. Early in the spring I had a call from a couple that had lost both the wife’s engagement ring and her wedding band out in a very large area of sand. My Father-in-Law, Tom Ledew had a freshwater machine but he didn’t have a saltwater machine. He had expressed some interest in the Ringfinders so I decided to ask him to join me and loan him one of my Saltwater machines. You can read the long story on another post but suffice it to say, Tom found one and I found the other and he now has a good Beach machine and is hooked. 😄. So that brings us to our current story… back in July, the day after the Blue Angels flew, I got a call from a very nice young man named Thomas. He had proposed to his beautiful bride, Dani only a few months earlier and she had not had the chance to have the engagement ring properly sized. They were in the water at Quietwater beach along with hundreds of other people and the ring just slipped off her finger sometime in the afternoon. I immediately came out to the beach and got all of the information that I could, right down to pictures from the boat, the tides and even the gps coordinates where the boat they were in was anchored during the air show. It was a huge area as far as water recoveries go but this is one of the nicest couples that I have met and I set out to do my best. I searched everywhere and dug up hundreds of pull tabs and I even found two other rings (one, I was able to find the owner in Tennessee 😃) but I could not find Thomas and Dani’s ring. I was bummed but I knew it was a large area so I asked if I could come out at sunrise the next morning. They said of course and I put in a few hours that morning and then put in a few more after work. All to no avail. I told Thomas that I could not find it and he was down but I told him I truly thought his ring was out there and with his permission I would like to keep looking for it when able and I would also like his permission to have my Father-in- Law help me with the search. Thomas said I could do whatever but felt the ring was lost forever and he said with all the people swimming that day he feared someone had seen it on the bottom and picked it up. I told him not to worry and that maybe one day I would come across it and call them. Fast forward 4 months and here we are in November. They were such a nice couple that I just haven’t been able to let their ring go. Anytime I am out that way, I always search for it a bit. I even came up with some down home engineering that anchors into the sand and lets me do overlapping circles to be absolutely sure I hadn’t missed a spot. Tom had been out to help me several times also and was becoming equally vested in finding this ring. Well within these 4 months, Tom Ledew was accepted into the Ringfinders over in Orange Beach, AL. (Congrats Tom! 🎉) and he had a recovery in the Gulf. I mentioned that Tom has a good beach machine but he remembered that first experience with my Excal which is simply the best machine there is for finding a ring out in the saltwater. Tom asked if he could borrow it and of course I said yes. He found the ring that day in AL so quickly and was so amazed that he had to have one for himself. Then it got really cold 🥶 and our plans to get in the water got put on pause. Through it all I kept going back to thinking about Thomas and Dani’s ring and I just knew I had covered the area where they thought it was. I also kept thinking that maybe Thomas was right and someone had picked it up but I just knew that gold sinks in the sand so quickly that it was almost impossible. I decided that the only possibility was it had to be a bit deeper where maybe the boat had swung around and Dani had to swim out a little to get on the ladder. Swimming + an oversized ring = an unhappy couple. So Tom and I made a plan to go back out and see if my theory was correct. Tom beat me to it and got his coil over it first but I am so glad that he did. This was his first major target recovered with the machine he tried for the first time earlier this year in the spring. It all comes full circle. 😃. The most fun I had was calling Thomas. Dani happened to be sitting right next to him when I started telling them who I was. Thomas had saved my number as “the Ring Guy” so he knew pretty quickly. They were shocked that after 4 months (twice as long as they had been engaged) this random guy would call and tell them that he had the ring that would forever remind them of the day that Thomas proposed. Congrats y’all, I hope this will remind you through the years as it will me to never give up! 😊
Heidi called me Saturday afternoon and asked if there was any chance I could help her find two very important rings in some thick grass. I assured her I would come right away and off I went. Here is the story in Heidi’s own words.
Nathan emailed me late Friday night and asked if there was any chance I could help him look for his lost tungsten wedding ring at the beach. He explained that they had spent part of the afternoon on the sand and in the water and only realized his ring was missing later while eating dinner. Nathan was not real used to wearing his wedding ring because he and his lovely wife had just gotten married four days earlier and they were on their honeymoon the day he lost his ring. Bummer, hey?! And to make matters worse they were going to be returning home to Missouri in just two days. I assured Nathan that his lost wedding ring was not going to be washed away and if he could remember exactly where they entered the water and about how far out they went…then there was a very good chance of finding his lost ring.
Erick had just bought his daughter a new fishing pole and they were on the end of his parents dock trying it out for the very first time when disaster struck! Erick said that after putting a nice juicy worm on the hook, he went to wash the goo from his hands and as he shook the excess water off, his heavy gold wedding ring went “plunk” right into the dark lake water! Erick was stunned as he watched it hit the water and disappear out of sight. Right away he tried to figure out how he could retrieve his ring so he checked the depth of the water and determined it to be around 11 feet deep. Too deep for him to jump in and attempt any sort of search himself. And the more he thought about his situation he felt there just had to be some way or someone who could help him retrieve his lost ring. So he went online and soon came across theringfinders.com and one of my successful recovery stories.
Greg called me about a ring that his girl friend had accidentally dropped in a lake and mentioned it was only in a few feet of water. I explained how I normally retrieve lost rings and he assured me he knew exactly where it fell off of the dock and into the water. He said his girl friend had used a mask and tried to locate the ring but was unsuccessful. It had been lost almost a month prior to our conversation and I assured Greg that the ring was most likely in the same spot where it originally fell. 
I parked at a beach side restaurant in Fernandina. On the back deck there was a band playing and I recognized the lead singer. I decided to go metal detect the beach and come back later that night to say hello.