Matai Bay Tag | The Ring Finders

Marys husband was fishing at Whatuwhiwhi while on holiday in the Doubtless Bay area.
He was doing quite well, and landed a nice Kahawai.
While he was cleaning the fish in the tide, his wedding ring slipped off and was lost.
Mary later posted on the local Facebook pages asking for people to keep an eye out for it – I know the beach well, and knew it would be unlikely to be exposed on the surface until a favourable erosion event took place – if ever.
On the basis of this, and with an earlier « Pay it Forward » recovery in-hand, I decided to make the 100km trip to Tokerau peninsula to catch the next low tide…at 3am.
It was a pleasant night, clear skies meant that I was able to work the beach by starlight and the light breeze coming off the sea carried the smell of seaweed.
It doesn’t get much better than this.
I had a rough start point, so started to work back and forth along the beach as the tide dropped.
With a campground nearby, the usual aluminium can tabs were present in good numbers though.
An hour passed, then in the wash at the waters edge, I got a double-thump in the phones.
The broken shell sand was loose enough for me to push my hand into it and my fingers closed around a familiar shape.  I glanced at my watch, it was just after 2am.
I took the Trophy Photo and, as it was such a pleasant night, carried on detecting on spec.
Until the novelty of can tabs wore off.
I waited until a reasonable hour before messaging Mary, unfortunately she didn’t see it before I had to head back south.
About a week later we were able to meet up and I could hand her husbands ring back.

Diane phoned me yesterday, her son had just lost his ring in the sea at Tokerau Beach in Doubtless Bay, NZ.
Fortunately it was at high tide, and the water was only a metre deep when lost.

I arrived a few hours later for low tide. Diane and Dan were there to meet me and we went through the usual twenty questions.
Diane told me that she had paced out to roughly where the ring had been lost – Textbook stuff to help your neighbourhood Ringfinder.

Both of them marked their respective « X » in the sand where they thought it might be and I started the search pattern, half an eye on the motorbikes and four-wheel drives roaring past (Tokerau Beach is classed as public highway, it’s supposed to be limited to 30km/h, but…).

It was nice to be out of surf and on nice open, flat, hard sand for the first time in a long while.

After about a dozen lines, I got a solid tone – could only be one thing.

It was about 5cm down – Dan’s face lit up as I showed it to him.

… Mums mark in the sand was the closest 🙂