This weekend I was contacted and requested to find a wedding ring mount and stone.

The white gold mount and diamond from a wedding ring had apparently broke off the band.

I went to a local jeweler and secured a similar mount to determine if my Excalibur II was capable of detecting this small article.

Under the right condition the Minelab seemed to give a faint response. I was hopeful.

The callers residence was another issue, apparently high voltage buried cable and lots of building debris.

I spent couple of hours on my hands and knees with my pinpointer in the grassy areas where the mount and stone might have possibly fallen off.

My work revealed no results

Thanks Chris Turner for the insight on this project

In the company of two American Hero’s

Medal of Honor Recipients

Staff Sergeant Salvatore A. Giunta

Staff Sergeant Leroy A. Petry

Within 48 hours of being registered with The Ring Finders I received my first call.  Happy and excited with the prospect of my first recovery I set off for Bournemouth to search for a young ladies lost engagement ring in Bournemouth with the’ big day’ looming.  I grabbed my equipment and set off right away along Studland Beach – a place I had previously recovered many lost gold rings and jewellery.  Fortunately I received a very relieved message from her that upon returning home and taking off her boots, out fell the ring!

On a family trip five years and one day after Josh and Christine were married, Josh’s platinum wedding ring slipped off his finger in knee-deep water at Pilot Beach on the mid north coast of New South Wales in Australia.

Christine’s email arrived in my inbox four days later closely followed by that « it’s on » feeling I’m sure we all experience at the start of a search.

Pilot Beach is about a ninety minute drive north from my home and it is probably best described as a semi-surf beach lying inside two break walls at the mouth of the Camden Haven River.

After speaking to Christine and gathering  information on the time of loss, surf conditions, tide height and the arrival of  Google Earth photos of the location and several family photos from the day we set off to search for the ring. Christine expressed gratitude that someone would drop everything and head out looking for something for a total stranger and I suspect that she was not overly hopeful that the mission would be a successful one.

Searching for lost items with no direct contact with the owner can be difficult and Christine was speaking to me from Sydney but her photos and maps and the accuracy of her memory of the location that became apparent on arrival at the search area provided the confidence I needed.

With the search area pegged out from the maps and photos I went to work with my Minelab Excalibur. Encouragingly there were few signals from the detector in the upper sector of the search area and with one possible target marked in the mid sector in about a foot of water. Digging here was futile as the surf returned most of the sand dug right back into the hole so I completed the lower sector in waist deep water as the tide dropped locating one bottle top for the rubbish bin.

A few minutes of careful digging and scanning back  at the marked signal uncovered a  platinum ring with the inscription confirming that it was the target ring approximately one foot from the surface of the sand. A quick message to Christine on the phone while dodging the beginning of a thunder storm saw us back in the car for the return journey. Mission accomplished thanks to The Ring Finder

Nick