Pendant found in Santee
Mick contacted me wanting to find a pendant that his father used to wear before he passed. Mick himself buried the gold nugget pendant on the other side of a retaining wall in the back yard of the family residence for safe keeping. Now, years later, the mother has passed too and the house is to be sold, so, time to dig up the pendant….except Mick can’t quite remember exactly where that is, or, how deep, except that he didn’t think it was more than a foot. After some digging in a 3′ X 15′ area, he decided using a metal detector would be much easier. I met him at the site this morning before it got too blazing hot. A relatively small search area, but, rebar in the retaining wall, irrigation plumbing, various metal junk, and landscape lighting made it a bit more difficult. After using both my 15″ and 6″ coils without success, it was time to scrape off a layer to get to deeper targets. With the sun starting to poke through the overcast, I could feel why shoveling this dirt was plan B. Another pass over the search area finally produced a non-ferrous signal worth investigating. Even though the pendant was initially buried inside a plastic bag, no remnants of said bag came to light, but, the pendant did! A happy Mick can now sell the house without any sadness or lingering doubts about leaving his family heirloom behind. A pleasure to meet you Mick, and thank you for the reward.
Its a beautiful afternoon in one of New Jerseys finest beach towns, Seaside Park. The oceans were calm, winds light and variable, which made for a perfect day of shell collecting. Dylan and his daughter set out to do just that. Unfortunately all the absolutely beautiful shells they had gathered together, just couldn’t make up for what had just happened. They were down at the very bottom of the tide line, by the drop off, picking up just one last shell, when Dylan decided to rinse off his hands and call it a day. At that very moment he watched his ring slip off his finger, and drop into the sand, just as a wave was rolling in. Even thought the ocean was as calm as we will experience here, Dylan had absolutely no luck over the next two days locating his beautiful wedding ring. When he called me and told me it had already been two days, and that it was just about dead low tide where his ring slipped off, I didn’t have a good feeling about the recovery, at that moment. What he did have in his favor was the fact that it had been dead calm, and was going to continue that way for the next few days. I told Dylan I would be on the beach for the next low tide which was day 3 of his ring being lost on the bottom of the ocean. I was out at 4 AM scouring every inch of the location he had marked with his phone in google maps, with not even one signal. Unfortunately I had prior obligations the next 2 days and would not be able to return until the following morning low tide. It was 5 AM or so, and here I am wondering around in the ocean again, but this time in about thigh deep water my machine sounds off a perfect low tone that you can tell almost in an instant was Dylan’s ring. I missed it in the first scoop, then BINGO !!!! I had his ring after 6 full days in the ocean. Believe me friends, this situation almost never exists in the state of NJ, but luckily for him it did that week. I messaged him asking for a detailed description, because all we had mentioned was white gold in our other conversations. I was pretty positive this was his ring, and the pictures confirmed that. I texted him pics and he was in total shock. We agreed to meet a few hours later for the monumental return.
