Gold Sword Charm Found on Fort De Soto North Beach
Item recovered August 2, 2025.
This recovery was another where I happened to be at the right place at the right time. The last time this happened was exactly one month ago when I found a ring for Quinn on St. Pete Beach.
I was out enjoying the perfect detecting conditions on Fort De Soto’s North Beach on a beautiful summer Saturday. I had already been out there for several hours and was getting tired, thirsty and ready to head back home. As I was walking back along the water’s edge, I was approached by a young man who had asked if my detector could find something that was made of gold. His sister had lost a charm off her necklace a little ways down the beach and her entire family was searching for it for the past 15-20 minutes with no luck.
I was led to the area where the charm was lost. English wasn’t the family’s primary language, and I could only understand that the item lost was a small gold sword from a necklace. It was lost along the water’s edge, where waves were coming and going. I wasn’t sure how large the item was, but it was possible the waves had pulled the item deeper into the water or buried it in sand.
The pressure to find this item was more intense than usual, with 8 people watching me work back and forth in the shallow water. I would find a target, and they would crowd around to see if it was the missing item, only to see it was a bottle cap. This happened again when I located a pull tab in the area. I moved up higher into the wet sand and got a solid low signal. When a wave washed over the area, I thought I saw a glimmer of gold, so I dropped to a knee and pulled out my pinpointer instead of using my scoop.
My pin pointer immediately identified the item’s location just below the sand. I dug in with my fingers and saw gold. It was the lost sword charm they had been searching for!