Metal Detecting Recovery of Diamond Engagement & Wedding Rings by Brian Tucholke, Falmouth, Massachusetts

17 August 2025.  About three weeks ago I recovered a man’s wedding ring for Dave at a local private beach.  Dave had been referred to me by Bill, and today Bill gave me another call for help.  This time a guest, Maggie, had lost her diamond engagement and wedding rings, most likely at the same beach where Dave’s ring had fled his finger.  (Is there something about that beach that grabs rings off fingers?).  In any case he gave me Maggie’s phone number and I called her and left a message.  She called back within a short time and we met a half hour later to search for her rings.

Maggie explained that the rings had disappeared yesterday but she was not certain where they were lost.  She, her husband Jerry, and friends had searched the house where they were staying, with no result.  The remaining options were the yard, the walking route to the beach (a few hundred feet), and the dry beach sand.  Although she had gone into the water for a time, Maggie was certain that the rings were not on her finger when she entered the water.  After some Q&A and discussion, the dry beach sand appeared to be the best option for where to start the search.

I walked down to the beach with Maggie and Jerry, and when we arrived they described the relatively limited area where they thought they’d been sitting and where their activities were on the previous day.  There was a bit of a complication because other beach goers were on the spot where Maggie and Jerry surmised that they’d been sitting, but those folks were kind enough to let me ‘play through’ as I did several search swaths through the area.  There were some good signals but those invariably were from bottle caps (Corona is a popular one – they seem to ‘find your beach’) or aluminum pop tops (you know, the ones people insist on wresting from the top of a can so they can throw them in the sand); both of these can give a signal close to that of a gold ring.

As I finished covering that prime search area Jerry came over and proposed that they may have been sitting farther north near a different set of beach-grass clumps, so I shifted my search to that area.  It then took only a couple of minutes before I hit a target that sounded just like what I was looking for.  I took a scoop of sand and shook it out, and Maggie’s diamond engagement ring was lying on the bottom of the scoop pretty as you please.  Her wedding ring was still sitting on the sand at my feet.  I held up her engagement ring and motioned her over.  She and Jerry arrived in disbelief and as she glanced down she also found and picked up her own wedding ring from the sand.  As you can imagine, the celebration was intense and was joined by some nearby beach folk who’d been monitoring the proceedings.

Maggie and Jerry celebrated their second wedding anniversary only a couple of weeks ago, and they were just preparing to return to their home from vacation.  I’m really happy that Maggie’s rings are back on her finger where they belong, and that she and Jerry are able to return home elated, not burdened with the sadness of broken emotional ties and beautiful rings lost, perhaps forever.