Wedding ring lost in the yard in Oregon. Located with a metal detector
Tuesday evening I received a text message from John asking for my help finding his gold wedding ring. He explained that the day before he had been working in his driveway and his ring flew off. He heard it hit the metal gate and it was gone. He believed it had landed in the cedar duff near the gate and tried using a “cheap metal detector” with no luck
As he was not too far from home, I told John I could come out the next day and take a look. He said he would check it with me in morning to confirm our schedules.
In the morning I received a text saying he had given it another shot searching with no luck. I told him I could be there in the early afternoon, and I arrived just after 1pm, finding John out in the yard with his detector.
I had him explain what he was doing when he lost his ring, and he said he had removed the dog bed from the back of his car and was brushing of hair with his left hand. He felt the ring come off and heard it hit the open metal gate. Unless it had bounced off the gate, it should have landed in a relatively small area under a large cedar tree. The area was covered in a thick layer of debris from the tree, and next to a metal framed trailer. John had also raked the area searching for the ring, so there were piles of debris.
I had some Bluetooth issues, so I was running the Manticore without headphones, and chatted with John as I searched. There were a lot of junk signals, but I got a strong hit and found a deck screw. John explained there had been an incident where the dog had scattered a box of screws around the yard, so I knew to ignore similar signals. On the back side of my first pass, I hit a signal every detectorist will dig. I kicked back the top layer of needles and found nothing. I got to hard packed soil, so I knew it wasn’t the ring, but dug around with the pinpointer. I pulled out a dime and handed it to John. Kind of a teachable moment, letting John hear the difference between a coin and junk metal.
I began my second pass up and quickly got a very good signal. Again kicked off the tree debris, the sound and VDI improved. Under about four inches of debris, there was the missing ring. (Probably buried deeper from raking and walking over the area)
I held the ring up and handed it to John. Got a high five 🖐️ and he was happy this would get him out of the doghouse with his wife. Had a nice chat about the metal detecting hobby, and fishing our local rivers.
Always great to meet new friends
