“Yep, RingFinding Is An Actual Thing, How Can I Help?”, Scarborough Beach, Western Australia
“Yep, ringfinding is an actual thing, how can I help!” was my reply when I got a call from Brett who’d lost his white gold wedding band in the water whilst at the dog beach this morning. He’d been poking around on google when he found ‘TheRingFinders.com’ and then me. He said he was surprised to find such a service existed, and in Western Australia.
After telling me what had happened, I checked the weather conditions and realised I needed to attempt a recovery asap as the wind, swell and tides were getting worse and it may be a week before better conditions for a search in the water might arrive.
Happy happy happy joy joy joy!
I asked if Brett could meet me at the beach in 40 mins to show me where he felt he had been in the water.
After meeting at the carpark I asked him to go to the beach ahead of me while I ‘suited up’, and place a ‘witches hat’ (road safety cone) as close as possible to where he felt he’d lost the ring. Brett had explained they had made some sandcastles in the morning so we could easily find where they had been.
When I got to the beach my heart sank a little as first I realised the sea had washed away the sandcastles (making locating the search area all the more difficult) and secondly the sea conditions did not look at all good for a wading search and in fact shortly after starting the search Brett and I could not move forward against the strong undertow which was also folding my detectors coil back against the shaft!
A bit depressed about the situation I left the water and asked Brett if there was any chance he might have lost it on the beach? He said he felt strongly that he had lost it in the water but could not be sure so I placed a ‘witches hat’ about 5 m either side of the one he had placed and began searching the beach. The first half of the search area produced only one target, you guessed it, a bottle cap! Now normally beer bottle caps are the bane of all metal detectorists (our beaches, parks and roadsides are literally loaded with these and aluminium pull tabs) but in this case when I showed Brett he remembered having seen it whilst mucking around that morning so we knew we were very close to where he had been. This certainly raised my hopes and mood!
As I approached the waves when I started searching the other half of the search area I got a great signal and thought, surely this is it..
As I retrieved the target I could not believe what I was seeing, I had just found a thick gold chain just a few inches down in the sand! On closer inspection we found it was ‘gold plated’ and since we were on a dog exercise beach I figure it was lost by a dog, not a human! (Anyway unless a dog calls to claim it, my dog Dylan now has some ‘lucky’ bling to wear for special occassions such as future ring finding assignments!)
Resuming the search I made another pass up and back and right at the waters edge got another solid signal from my metal detector. Feeling in the sand I felt the unmistakeable shape of a ring and exposing it from the sand, looked up to Brett and said “would this be your ring?”.
Well you can imagine the relief we all felt when Brett began to smile from ear to ear and said “yep, thats definately it”. And so ended the search for another ‘lost smile’. Kudos to Brett for finding near enough, the exact spot where he and his family had been. In the end the ring was within a few meters of the cone he had placed on the beach and I must have been very close to standing on it as I walked down to search the water when we first arrived!
It is always so rewarding to reunite people with their sentimental items, and this one was no exception, I can’t wait for that next call…