Early Sunday morning, I got a call from Connor in Longview, Washington. His wife had lost her wedding ring, and he was hoping I could help track it down.
A couple of days earlier, the two of them had been tossing a football in their front yard when, mid-throw, his wife saw her diamond ring slip off her finger. She watched it catch the light as it sailed through the air before disappearing somewhere in the lawn. Over the next few days, Connor, his wife, and a group of friends searched tirelessly—on their hands and knees, combing through the grass. They even sectioned off the area they believed it landed in and carefully cut the lawn down to the dirt with scissors. When that didn’t work, they bought a metal detector, only to discover it wasn’t as straightforward as they’d hoped.
The yard presented a unique challenge. The ring had been lost near pad-mounted electrical transformer boxes, and the property sat beneath overhead power lines. Between the underground conduit and the electrical interference from above, the detector constantly gave false signals. Thinking the issue might be the equipment, they upgraded to a better model—but the results were the same.
That’s when they found me on RingFinders.
We scheduled a visit for later that day, and my wife, my 10-year-old daughter, and I made the trip out. We began by gridding off the front yard and doing a careful sweep. I adjusted my detector settings several times to compensate for the electrica
l interference. After covering the most likely areas, I noticed an old project pickup truck sitting near where they had been playing. It had no engine and looked like it hadn’t moved in quite some time.
I asked Connor if we could shift it. He hooked up some tow straps and pulled it forward about 15 feet, giving us access to the ground beneath. Earlier, my wife had tried reaching under it with a pinpointer, but the truck’s metal frame had made it impossible to get a clear signal.
Once the truck was out of the way, I made a few passes over the patch of overgrown grass where it had been sitting. Then—BOOM. A strong, clean signal, shallow and right in the gold range. I bent down, lifted a clump of dried grass—likely tossed there when they had hand cut the lawn with scissors—and there it was. The ring, nestled at the bottom.
I handed it to my wife, who presented it to Connor just as he was finishing parking the truck. The look on his face said everything—pure relief and joy. He was incredibly generous and later left us a kind review that we’ve since added to our testimonials.
As we drove home, I thought about something my daughter had done before we left for Longview on our ring find—she had prayed that we’d find the ring. Well, prayer answered! 🙏
