The Ring Finders Blog | Page 498 of 930

Monday August 12, 2019.  I received a call from a young woman who lost a ring while playing kickball at a local city park. The owner of the ring, Tamia, was rolling the ball for the kids to kick when she felt and saw her ring launch off her finger, fly through the air and land in the grass about 20′ away. The grass in that particular spot was very thick and matted making a visual recovery nearly impossible.  For years Tamia was asking her mother if she could have that ring. Finally, on Tamia’s birthday earlier this year her mom gifted the ring to her. Tamia beamed with pride as she told me the story of how she gained possession of the beautiful gold and diamond ring and what it meant to her, and how devastating it would be to have to tell her mom that the ring was lost.

I arrived at the park after work around 4:15pm Monday afternoon. After a brief phone conversation with Tamia about the location where the ring was lost, I changed the batteries in my Garrett AT Pro metal detector and my Garrett Carrot pin-pointer and got busy. With the AT Pro metal detector set up in Pro-Zero mode and the pin-pointer set to detect surface and very shallow sub surface items, I set up some visual grid points with nearby objects and started the search.  I found a small handful of coins, about $0.80 buried in the matted grass including a quarter sized coin from the United Arab Emirates. I got to the end of my 1st grid row and turned around and started my next pass. About 10 minutes after I got started my AT Pro rang up a mid to high 40’s signal. (a numeric scale on the metal detector to help the operator interpret what the detector has passed over) The signal was very loud in my headphones indicating a surface or near surface target. I turned on the pin pointer and pushed the tip into the grass to verify the depth and location of the target. When I pushed the tip of the pin pointer into the tangled grass, it deflected off the the side of an object that rested just below the surface of the grass. I pushed the grass away and saw Tamia’s ring sparkling in the sun.   I got that ear to ear smile knowing the payoff of seeing this family treasure back where it belonged was at hand.

Tamia arrived about 30 minutes after I found the ring so I had plenty of time on how to reveal that the ring was recovered.  As Tamia approached, I saw that she had two young children with her, this helped perfectly with the reveal. I asked Tamia if the oldest of the two children could have the coins I had found during my search, she approved. With an outstretched hand, the youngster eagerly awaited the coins, which fell into his hand. After his hand was nearly full I asked Tamia to open her hand so I could give her the rest of the coins and dropped the ring in her hand. She was immediately overcome with emotion…me too…this is the true payoff! Ring and finger were united once again as seen in the picture above.