07/04/2017 Dune Acres, Indiana, Porter County, a « Boater’s Beach » sandbar.
Got a text from a lady who had lost her white gold wedding ring yesterday in Lake Michigan at a “boater’s beach”, in about 4 to 5 feet of water.
She put me in contact with her husband Wade, who said he had a “pretty good idea where it was lost”.
The next morning I drove to the slip, met with Wade, loaded up my gear in his boat and we started for the site of the lost ring.
The wind was picking up, the waves were growing larger. Even in the large cabin cruiser/speedboat it was a fairly slow and rough ride to the sandbar site. When we first spoke after I arrived there, he said he was pretty sure of the location and it was “about a hundred yard sized area”. He actually thought he had seen the ring laying in the sand yesterday while looking for it. He dove down, grabbed at where he through it was, but came up with only handfuls of sand.
I was concerned with Wade having an accurate enough location to narrow the search area, as one hundred yards in the water would take quite some time to cover, essentially a needle in a haystack!
Luckily, Wade had taken some photos yesterday and had his geolocation enabled for the photos. He retrieved the data, plugged in the GPS coordinates in Google Maps and essentially drove us right to the spot.
Wade and I set the front and back anchors, the boat was getting thrashed pretty bad by some larger rogue waves breaking at the sandbar.
Being the 4th of July, Wade got the flag out to fly.
I jumped in and began searching, the wind had blown in some fresh chilly offshore water. The area had lots of black sand and the waves were getting to be a hindrance.
I basically grid searched the area where Wade thought the ring would be. After about twenty minutes or a half hour, I had covered the location around the boat and about twenty yards in each direction thoroughly.
I had brought a spare detector and had earlier mentioned to Wade that he was welcome to utilize it. He asked if there was anything he could do, I told him he was welcome to try using the other detector. I set it up, showed him how it should sound for a ring and told him to just tell me if it makes that noise.
Literally, in less than five minutes, while he was searching slightly closer to shore, he excitedly yells to me “It’s doing something here!”, “ It’s making that noise!”, “Right here!”.
I made my way over, checked the target, it sounded like a nice smooth mid-tone, gently scooped it up, and there was what appeared to be a nice white gold wedding ring in my scoop.
Wade was super excited and relieved at the same time. Even better yet, he actually get’s to say that he found his wife’s special ring for her!
He had mentioned some things that hadn’t gone so well for him in the recent month’s, but said this made it all better.
I was happy to help him find his wife’s lost ring!
This was a rather unique recovery, with him actually being the finder of the ring, thanks to my gear and a quick rundown of how it works. Actually glad it worked out that way, makes the tale that much better!
*photos of Wade and his wife’s ring
