Ring lost at Mission Bay found
Brendan and his family were visiting here in San Diego. On their last night here, they had a bonfire on the beach. While opening a plastic bag, it popped loose suddenly, and Brendan’s wedding ring went flying into the dry sand and disappeared. Not knowing exactly where, or, even which direction it went, it was impossible to find without a metal detector. An online search for help resulted, and I got a call the next morning. As luck would have it, I was only a couple of blocks away presiding over our local detecting club monthly
meeting. Brendan explained the situation and that they were leaving town in the early afternoon, so, time was fairly important in getting his ring back before they headed to the airport. The meeting soon ended and I headed over to conduct the search. We met at the site and Brendan gave me a good idea as to where ground zero was. I started a spiral pattern out from that point. First « good » sounding target ended up being a pull tab. Second good sounding target read the same, and was Brendan’s ring. A relieved Brendan can now head home with his wedding band on his finger. A pleasure to meet you Brendan, and thank you for the reward.











Well it goes without saying that you never know what kind of events may lead up to a ring getting lost. This story is no exception. On May 8th I was contacted by the best man of a wedding party. He explained that during the couples ceremony, at a bayside resort, he had accidentally dropped the brides ring onto the deck and it slipped thru the cracks and into the bay! At the time he had called I was headed out to dinner with my family for Mother’s Day and it was just about high tide. After receiving some pictures and descriptions of the area I knew this could be very challenging as the search area was located under a deck / pier that extended over the bulkhead and into the bay. I figured it would be best to wait until dead low tide as the area was in about 12-15’ of water at the moment. Around 12:30am I headed over with a friend whom was lending a hand and met up with the remaining members and guests of the wedding party. Luckily the staff at “The Reeds” in Stone Harbor NJ were awesome at helping to pinpoint the area and provide a floating dock to work from, kind of like Tom Sawyers raft, lol. They even went so far as to remove some of the mahogany decking in an attempt to locate the ring. Obviously the wedding party was devastated over this accident and all reasonable attempts were made to find the dropped ring. You could feel the obvious tension surrounding the events that unfolded and this just drove the determination to a positive outcome further! After making our way down to the dock we boarded the floating dock and paddled under the deck / pier to the approximate area. After checking for about 15-20 minutes I was able to recover the brand new never worn rose gold and diamond band!! Much to my and everyone’s relief! The ring was under some of the structural members in about 2’ of water amongst some horseshoe crabs. The bride, groom, best man and remaining members of the wedding party were ecstatic!! Another happy couple! Congratulations and here’s to a lifetime of happiness!!


I had a guy to contact me several months ago about a high school class ring he had lost in 2005. He had since moved out of state up to Pennsylvania. This weekend being Mother’s day he was in town visiting family and had obtained permission from the current homeowners to do a search in the yard. So this has been several months in the making. He thought it was white gold, but wasn’t certain. I wasn’t sure what kind of signal I would get on my CTX, and I knew it would be several inches deep, so I was doomed to dig just about everything. I started up towards the house and worked my way down to the street, drawing my grid lines. I had been there about three hours and had dug a bag full of trash and modern coins. It’s slow going when you have to dig nearly everything. We had only about five feet of yard left before we got to the street when I got a signal that at first looked like trash. The CTX didn’t give me a VDI number, (I think there was trash very nearby), but I did have a consistent tone and a small tight target identification picture on the screen. Since it was consistent I dug it and out popped a ring that had been in the ground for 16 years. It was 3-4 inches deep, a little deeper than I thought it might be. Another happy ring owner!
