Pendants lost at South Mission Bay Found
Danielle was playing with a puppy who came up to her on the beach, when the dog snagged her necklace breaking it. She had two pendants on that chain fall off into the dry sand. The next day I was contacted by Danielle after she found my phone number on The Ring Finders website. We made arrangements to meet that afternoon to define the search area and get the particulars on how they were lost and what I would be looking for. It sounded like a nice easy one for a change….wrong. We met at the site, and as luck would have it, a group of people were camped in and on the edge of the search area. Since I was looking for both a small silver pendant and larger gold one (one that had belonged to her grandmother), every non-ferrous target would have to be scooped so nothing was missed. Good thing they weren’t made of steel, as the place is paved with nails and other ferrous fire ring debris. I gridded the entire area that I could without having to displace the folks that were camped there, but, couldn’t find either pendant. The people camped there were curious as to what I was looking for, and were nice enough to move some of their gear so I could expand the search area a bit into where they were set up. Still nothing. We figured, as unlikely as it was, that someone must have spotted them and picked them up since the time they were lost. I asked Danielle to send me any photos she may have of the two pendants and I’d keep them on file in case I ran across someone who may have detected that area and found them. It was a nice day and I decided to stay and detect for a while. I went up the beach an eighth of a mile or so and worked my way back hoping by the end of the afternoon everyone would be gone and I’d have the whole area to myself. I made it back to the original search area just before sunset, everyone was gone, and I completely gridded the area where I couldn’t search earlier. Sure enough, just slightly out of the search area where the previous folks had parked their wagon (which we hadn’t moved), I got a signal that turned out to be the silver pendant. A careful search of the surrounding sand and the gold pendant’s weak low tone signal came through the nail and junk infested site and into my headphones. Danielle was very happy to get her family heirloom back again. A pleasure to meet you and thanks for the reward.
