#PolandMaine Tag | The Ring Finders

🚨 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐍𝐄𝐄𝐃𝐋𝐄 𝐈𝐍 𝐀 𝟏𝟓,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐒𝐐𝐔𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐅𝐎𝐎𝐓 𝐔𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐖𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐇𝐀𝐘𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐂𝐊! 🚨

On August 3rd, my phone started blowing up. Facebook notifications were pouring in, tag after tag, mentioning me on a local Poland, Maine community board post.

The Poland, Maine community was trying to connect me with a man named Matt. Matt had posted a heartfelt plea to the group: he had recently lost his titanium wedding ring at Tripp Lake Beach, and he was desperately hoping a Good Samaritan might spot it and let him know.

When Matt called me, the true scale of the mission became clear.

About two weeks earlier, Matt had been enjoying a beautiful, sunny day with family and friends at Tripp Lake Beach, taking advantage of the scorching summer heat by cooling off in the water. But fresh water has a way of shrinking fingers fast! 😮

Matt had spent his day wading across the entire length of the public beach—a stretch easily 300 feet long. Even worse, he had been swimming up to 50 or 60 feet out from the shoreline.

When you do the math, that meant the ring was resting somewhere inside a massive 15,000 to 18,000 square foot grid of dark lake water. By any measure, this was an incredibly massive underwater search area, and the clock had already been ticking for two weeks…

To make matters even more daunting, Matt dropped another bombshell: he had already tried searching the water with a borrowed metal detector. Not only that, but two other people had also brought their detectors down to the beach to scan the area.
All three attempts came up completely empty. 🛑

Honestly, looking at the sheer size of Tripp Lake Beach, it was no wonder. Dragging consumer gear through a massive underwater grid without a highly systematic search pattern is almost impossible.

When Matt asked if we could help, I took a hard look at the calendar. My schedule was completely packed. I was fully booked for recoveries on both August 4th and August 5th. But we don’t like giving up on a ring, especially when the community rallies to find us!

Our August 5th hunt was a critical, time-sensitive low-tide search down in Ogunquit, scheduled for very early in the morning. Gary Hill and I looked at the map and made a plan. The second we wrapped up the coastal ocean hunt in Ogunquit, Maine: Beautiful Place by the Sea t, we would pack up the Ring Finder Mobile and make the 1.5-hour drive inland to Poland, Maine . Two completely different bodies of water, two completely different environments, all in a single day. 🚙💨

Once Gary and I arrived at the lake and finally met Matt in person, he walked us right down to the water’s edge. I took one long look at the sheer, overwhelming size of that beach and a thought immediately popped into my head: “There is absolutely no way we are finding his ring today.”

The area was just too massive. Looking out at that water, I knew that anyone just walking around aimlessly had—as Matt accurately put it in his original Facebook post—a total “one-in-a-billion shot.” In my mind, I was already calculating the logistics. I figured Gary and I were going to need at least 4 or 5 full days of a highly disciplined, hyper-systematic grid search to clear this place safely.

But we didn’t drive 1.5 hours to stand on the shore and doubt ourselves. It was time to get to work! ⚔️

I turned to Matt and laid out the battle plan. We would use a prominent, large rock breaking the surface of the water as our deep outer boundary, as Matt confirmed he hadn’t gone out past that depth.

To keep our grid lines perfectly straight and ensure we didn’t miss a single inch of the lakebed, we utilized the rocks along the shoreline as our landmark anchors. Gary would start right where we were at the north end of the beach, working his way from the edge of the water out to the deep boundary and back, systematically grid-searching his way south toward a specific rock landmark on the shore.

Meanwhile, I walked further down the beach to that exact same shore rock—the one Gary would eventually stop at. That was my starting point. From there, I would work my grid lines from the shoreline out, systematically heading further south toward another visual lockup landmark on the beach.

As for Matt, he walked even further down the beach past my zone to start his own search, heading south to tackle the far end of the grid.

We dropped our coils into the water, tuned out the world, and began swinging… 🎧🔊

Gary and I found the entire beach absolutely beautiful. The water was remarkably warm for an inland Maine lake, and as we got our rhythm down, we noticed something highly unusual: the targets were incredibly few and far between.

It was a very, very clean beach. Because we weren’t stopping to dig up the usual heavy layer of buried pull-tabs, bottle caps, and shredded aluminum foil, our search progress was moving significantly faster than I had originally anticipated. Since we weren’t digging many targets, we were moving right along, slicing through those 15,000 square feet with smooth, uninterrupted swings.

A fascinating thought crossed my mind as I looked over at Gary:
𝐻𝑎𝑑 𝑀𝑎𝑡𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑑𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑠 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑐𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ 𝑜𝑓 𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑒𝑡𝑠 𝑎𝑙𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦? 🤔

When inexperienced hunters or people with borrowed, basic machines go looking for a lost item, they usually dig up every single faint beep or scratchy iron signal they can find in a desperate attempt to find the ring. By doing that, they often inadvertently do the heavy lifting for us—stripping away all the shallow metallic “trash” and clearing the path.

Because they had unknowingly cleaned out the background noise, our advanced, high-discrimination machines could scan the lakebed completely unhindered. If that titanium wedding band was down there, there was no longer any junk left to hide it. It was going to scream the second our coils passed over it.

As we proceeded south along the lakebed, almost an hour had passed. The quiet hum of the machines was hypnotic, and I was already mentally mapping out the next major sections for Gary and me to search on the following days, fully expecting this to be a multi-day operation.

Then, out of nowhere…
𝐁𝐀𝐍𝐆!!! 🔥

My headphones lit up with the absolute best-sounding target of the entire day so far on the Minelab Excalibur II. It was a beautiful, solid tone that broke the lake’s silence.

I stopped dead in my tracks and yelled over to Gary, “This is a really good sounding target!”

I positioned my scoop and dug down into the lakebed. My first scoop came up—nothing but empty sand. The target was still in the hole.

I lined up the coil again, pushed the scoop down deeper into the sand, and lifted. As the second scoop broke the surface of the water, the lake sand began to rapidly sift through the drainage holes. All of a sudden, right there in the bottom of the scoop, I saw the ring! 🤩🏆

Gary was now walking over to me and he reached into my scoop and grabbed the ring. We both looked at it, completely stunned that the “one-in-a-billion shot” had just paid off in under an hour!

I turned toward the southern end of the beach and yelled down as loud as I could: “𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐓! 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐋𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒!” 📣

The distance between us was so immense that my voice had to travel clear across the water. Matt froze in his tracks. He was so far down the beach that his response barely carried back to us—just a very faint, disbelieving… “𝐘𝐨𝐮’𝐫𝐞 𝐤𝐢𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐞.” 🙏

As Matt hurriedly waded back through the water toward us, Gary and I were just beaming. We couldn’t wipe the smiles off our faces. We just couldn’t believe our good fortune. Better to be lucky than good, as the old saying goes, and we certainly got lucky by being in the exact right spot at the exact right time today.

The moment Matt reached us, pure relief washed over his entire face. You could visually see the heavy stress of being without his wedding ring completely leave his body. He could finally breathe and relax again.

But even in that moment of relief, Matt wasn’t thinking about himself. His thoughts went straight to his wife.

As the three of us began walking out of the water together, I turned to him and said, “𝑰’𝒎 𝒋𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒔𝒐 𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒚 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒈𝒐𝒕 𝒊𝒕 𝒃𝒂𝒄𝒌.”

Matt looked at the ring, then back at us, and replied: “𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝒉𝒂𝒗𝒆 𝒏𝒐 𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒂 𝒉𝒐𝒘 𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒚 𝒎𝒚 𝒘𝒊𝒇𝒆 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒆.” ❤️

𝐈𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐞𝐥 𝐈 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐬𝐚𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐟 𝐨𝐧 𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐨 𝐚𝐬 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭 𝐬𝐥𝐢𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐞 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐤𝐞! 𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐮𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐰𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐥𝐲 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐣𝐨𝐛 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝.

Just as the three of us stepped foot onto dry land, my phone started ringing. It was another panicked call about a lost ring—this time dropped into Crystal Lake in Gray, Maine , which was only about 7 miles down the road and directly on our way home!
I hung up, looked at my partner, and smiled: “Gary, pack up the Ring Finder Mobile… another lost ring awaits!” 🚙💨

Moments like this remind us why we do what we do. We truly have the best job in the world, and we love every single second of it!

⚠️ LOST SOMETHING PRECIOUS IN THE SAND OR WATER? ⚠️
Time is absolutely of the essence! Shifting tides, moving sand, lake currents, and crowded beaches mean the longer you wait, the harder it gets to find. Don’t waste critical hours trying to locate a DIY metal detector rental—call the professionals immediately!
📞 CALL OR TEXT US ASAP: 207-423-3027
We service beaches, lakes, yards, and parks all across Maine. Share this post to spread the word—you never know whose wedding ring you might help save next! 🔄👇

𝐑𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫: 𝐈𝐟 𝐈𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐓𝐨 𝐘𝐨𝐮, 𝐈𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐓𝐨 𝐔𝐬.

.