Newspaper Article – Lost Ring – Sun Prairie Star
We were recently featured in the Sun Prairie Star. The original story can be found at: http://theringfinders.com/blog/Dan.Roekle/2015/04/lost-ring-give-hope-ring-found-3-years/
metal detector Tag | Page 33 of 49 | The Ring Finders
Lost White Gold Ring .. Huntington Beach .. Found in Grass
Monday night .. 6-01-15 .. 10:30pm
I got a call Monday night about a white gold wedding band lost in the grass. Danny had been given my information from a guy that recommended TheRingFinders and my name. We talked about when I could meet him or his wife tomorrow. They had another detectorist look for the ring the first evening but it was late and Danny’s wife, Fallon was not available to narrow the search area.
I talked to Fallon setting up a 3pm meeting, because we had chores to take care of before then. It was not so important as this not a public park, it was just a large green grass area inside a gated community. Before meeting Fallon, I saw another park where the gardeners were mowing the lawns. I started to panic thinking I was too late. When Fallon arrived she took me to this other grassy park. Telling me that her 4 year old son Cody had his Dad’s ring in his hand when he got distracted he dropped it in the grass.
Fallon showed me an area half the size of a basketball court that Cody could have dropped it. Then she asked Cody, who said it was another 50 yards towards the trees. It looked best to break the area into four separate quadrants. I picked a starting point to start gridding diagonally. I like to start in the center and do a spiral type grid pattern. On my first quadrant I made two 60 ft. passes, 15 ft. after starting my 3rd pass I got a strong gold tone. Bamm! One white gold wedding band. The ring was hidden deep in 3 inches of grass. It could have never be seen by eye. Danny’s wife Fallon was ecstatic, but the two kids were busy doing kid things. It was another special Day in Huntington Beach.
Lost Dog Collar in Laural Canyon Dog Park, Los Angeles, CA…Found
I received a call from Audrey about a lost dog collar, lost at a dog park. The collar was from her friend Sandra’s former dog who had been her close companion for many years, but had passed away. She now had a beautiful German Shepherd pup that the collar went on when Audrey took him and her own dog to the dog park. Pups being what they are were playing and exploring when as Audrey explained it to me « The pup went into the weeds and trees with his clothes on, and came out naked » (the collar was missing).
We agreed to meet on Wednesday morning to conduct a thorough search of the area. I looked at the hillside, and it full of tall weeds and a lot of dead tree snags; a perfect place for the collar to be lost. Audrey told me that there was a tag with a Swiss cross and the dog’s name, that was attached to the collar which was very important as well. I put on a 6 inch coil in order to get into all of the small spaces between weeds and snags. I searched for about two hours until I finally found the collar, but the tag was not with it. I searched around the area for the tag hoping it fell off in the same area, but was unable to come up with it. The park is very large, and Audrey thought there might have been another spot where the tag might have come off, so I searched that area as well, but was unable to find the tag. Fortunately I was able to find the collar. I was able to provide some closure to the loss with the collar find.
Update 4-4-15:
Sandra found the missing dog tag close to home, so she has been reunited with both the tag and the collar.
Audrey sent the following email to include here:
Hello Steve,
Thank you so much for including our story on your blog and for coming out to help us.
I heard that Sandra called you and you went back to look for the tag, you are an amazing person.
Truly, I cannot thank you enough.
All the best,
Audrey
If you lose your ring or other metal item of value, call as soon as possible. I will work hard to help you find what you thought might never be found again. I search, Beverly Hills, Hermosa Beach, Huntington Beach, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Malibu, Manhattan Beach, Newport Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes, Redondo Beach, Santa Monica, Seal Beach, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Torrance, Venice Beach, and all parks, yards, gardens, and ponds (to 5 foot depths) in all of Orange County, all of Los Angeles County, and Ventura County.
Lost Engagement Ring FOUND in Severna Park, Maryland!
A few weeks ago I received a call from Tim explaining how his wife lost her engagement ring. He went on to say while she was almost positive it came off while walking their dogs down the driveway. The driveway, which was a good 100 yards or so long, was bordered the entire length on one side by wooded area. She believed it came off in a specific area where she recalled the dogs getting wrapped around some brush, but did not rule out any of the driveway due to the frigid temperatures that day. We made arrangements to meet the next day and Tim and Tara went over the area with me that he described the day before. I’ll let Tara tell you in her own words how things went down, but on a side note to my detecting colleagues….this was actually tough one to find! Reason is that although the ring was on the surface, there ended up being a piece of old « soda can » aluminum directly under the ring about 2 inches down! This means nothing to most of you who read this, but to us metal detecting geeks this spells trouble! A piece of « trash » like this so close to the target(in this case the ring!) acts like a shield to obtaining the « good » signal we would be looking for when searching for gold and/or platinum. I mention this in the event you are looking for something that should « sound » specific in your headphones and you have no luck. I suggest you take a break, regroup and come at the situation in a different manner. It sure paid off for me…….and for Tim and Tara!
« I came home from work and walked my dogs as usual. The only difference that day was the bitter cold temperature outside. I came in from my walk and noticed my engagement ring fell off (my fingers shrunk in the cold weather) I tried to retrace my steps but the area to cover was overwhelming, it was getting dark, and leaves were piled high. I panicked and called Home Depot & Ace Hardware trying to rent a metal detector. No one in the Severna Park area rented them-only sold, and they were thousands of dollars. I Googled « metal detector help severna park » and The Ring Finders popped up. We called and Jim scheduled to come over the very next morning at 6:30am (even though he was leaving for vacation that morning). Jim arrived and told me to stop and think, and walk him through my steps. We walked up and down the street and didn’t find anything. My husband and I had to leave for work, and Jim said he would try and stay a few more minutes. He explained if he didn’t find it, he would come back another day to search. My husband and I were preparing for the worst and discussed calling the insurance company.. when mid sentence we got a call from Jim! HE FOUND MY RING! Tears poured down my face! We met to pick it up and I immediately hugged him! Jim is an amazing man! We are so happy we called the site! Jim told us if it was out there, he would find it! He wasn’t going to give up on us! So I want to tell you if you are reading this because you lost something and you want it back CALL JIM NOW! »
– Tara & Tim
Severna Park MD
Amazing Lost Ring Story – Found Moments Before Big Snow Storm
My husband was helping me carry groceries from the car one evening when I noticed he seemed upset about something. I asked him what was wrong. He said that while I was shopping he was working on the computer and noticed that his wedding ring was missing from his hand.
I told him not to worry about it, after all hadn’t he recently scoffed when I had my own ring repaired that he couldn’t understand why we still bothered to wear wedding rings since we’d been married 25 years, everyone knew we were married, and it wasn’t like we would ever split up. A marriage is not a ring, I reminded him. A ring is just stuff. But John was clearly deeply upset. So I headed outside with a flashlight to search in the snow in the spot where he thought he’d been standing when the ring fell off his hand.
John is blind, and for many who are blind losing things is a regular part of life. One does not notice the gloves left behind in a friend’s car or the red-and-white cane left on the seat of a city bus. One is unable to see the phone that slips out of a pocket to fall silently into the snow or the keys that drop without a sound. Losing things is one of the recurring indignities of losing your vision and so it is for John. Misplacing things leaves him tense and frustrated, as if blindness has just scored another point leaving him scrambling once again to keep possession of the things in life that are most valuable to him, the intangible most of all.
John thought he may have lost the ring while playing with his guide dog in the snow but when I searched the spot with their footprints I didn’t see anything glinting in the flashlight beam. He was afraid the ring may have slipped off his finger while they were at work on campus, maybe while taking a mid-day break to play a game of tug-of-war outside the physics building. In fact he wasn’t sure when he lost the ring as he can’t see his hand. It may have been gone for weeks he feared.
That night he was sleepless over the loss of the ring. Even though I kept assuring him it was no big deal, it could be replaced, he was not consoled. Blindness was winning again. First thing in the morning I started calling around to rent a metal detector, but soon realized this was not a feasible plan. We’d be dragging the detector all over the city as there were several spots where John thought the ring might have fallen into the snow. And there was no guarantee we’d even figure out how to use it properly.
I kept putting on my coat and boots, going outside, searching the spot on the hill where John said he’d been standing when he thought the ring might have slipped off his hand. I’d get down on my hands and knees, search every inch of the frozen grass and snow, searching again and again. I had to find that ring! I had to see my husband happy again.
While searching for a local store that rented metal detectors, one of the hits that came up on Google was www.TheRingFinders.com. I exchanged a few messages with Dan Roekle and it was clear he was our best bet for finding the ring.
Dan and his kids came over to our house after work with their metal detector and other equipment in tow. We didn’t think there was much chance of finding the ring that evening as it was already dark, not to mention bitterly cold. But Dan wanted to get started and at least get a look at the first search site. Anyhow a Midwestern blizzard was bearing down, predicted to dump a half-foot of snow on the city, obliterating any tracks of where John and his dog had been.
I turned on the house lights, opened the garage door to flood the driveway with light and passed out flashlights. A group of us huddled in the cold to watch as Dan dropped a wedding ring made of the same metal as John’s onto the frozen trampled ground. The detector chirped, its screen lit up with a digital reading, and Dan began slowly making his way up and down the hillside, maneuvering the detector over snow and ice, listening for a tone similar to the one triggered by the test ring. The detector softly chirped every few moments as Dan passed a tree and he theorized that landscape stakes or discarded nails from a roofing job were to blame. “There’s a lot of metal in this hill,” he said.
It was clear John and I would have never been able to locate his ring with a rented metal detector. He’d been guiding the detector over the ground for only about five minutes when it chirped loudly and Dan announced a reading in the range of the test ring. “We’ve found it,” he said with certainty and you could almost hear the gasping of all the frozen breaths. His son Carter knelt in the spot where his dad and the detector pointed, and with a water-proof pin pointer worked to zero-in on the precise location of the ring in the snow. Carter scraped and dug through the snow and ice and within moments held it up as a whoop arose.
I may have been the most astonished as the ring had been pressed into the frozen earth in the exact location where I had searched on my hands and knees many times that day without spotting it. It was the spot where John had been standing when he pulled off his gloves after playing with his dog and leaned over to pick up the harness.
Thank you, Dan, Carter and Kylie!
Judy and John
Lost Ring off Balcony … Recovered … Long Beach, CA.
Last week I received a call about 9am from Luis asking me if I could help him find his platinum wedding band. Luis had looked for the ring for a whole day and a half. Then he got online thinking he could buy or rent a metal detector. Finding TheRingFinders directory and he decided to call me. He lives on the third floor of a high rise apartment complex. Standing on his balcony sweating the dust off a cushion, he heard a ping sound but didn’t realize it was his wedding band hitting the floor. A couple minutes later he realized that he was missing his wedding band that he has had been wearing for fifteen years. We discussed the details of the search area and I decided it would be better to wait till 3pm to meet up with him. It sounded like it was possible that the ring could have landed in his neighbor’s the ground floor patio which is about 3 feet larger than the upper floor balconies. We would not be able to search that patio, because neighbors had not returned from their weekend trip.
I had about 5 hours to put together a game plan for the search. Not knowing the location my mind ran through all kind of possibilities. When I got to the building I saw two sets of balconies. One set of had a big garden area with a lawn lawn in front of it and the other had a small garden area with a large asphalt driveway leading down to an underground parking lot. I was hoping the one with the lawn was going to be where Luis lived, because it would be more detector friendly. Well, it was the other area with the small garden. It only took about a half hour to go through it with my detector followed up by crawling around with my pin pointer ( hand held detector ) checking all the hard to get at spots. It’s important to keep the right frame of mind. It’s easy to give up on a search just before the miracle happens. I wasn’t looking forward to checking the underground garage and the drain, covered by a grating that couldn’t be removed.
Luis’s wife Melissa came down to tell us we had permission to get into the neighbors patio. We went into the patio and the first thing I saw was a mass of large potted ferns in corner most probable place for the ring to be. It was also loaded with many dry leaves. It looked like it was going to take some time to do a thorough search. Luis started looking on one side of the patio and I started scanning around the potted ferns using a small 6″ coil on my detector. It was hard to stay positive looking at the mass of ferns. Before starting to look through the fern leaves, I checked against the wall and the miracle happened. I saw the ring hiding in the leaves against the wall. Without touching the ring I took a couple photos of the ring before I called Luis over to see it. Again I don’t know who was happier, me or Luis. » The ring wasn’t lost, it was just waiting to be found «
Ring Found in Attic, Worth the Wait!
A perfect duo – ATPro and 4.5” Sniper coil – for an attic search
With out this duo Keith would more than likely still be without his father’s wedding band that he had worn for several years. In his original E-mail; Keith wrote “I am not 100% certain but I think the ring fell into about 2 feet of blown-in insulation in my attic. Back in February my roof was leaking, I went into the attic to investigate, and later that evening I realized my ring was gone. If the ring is in the attic it’s in a tight spot close to the eaves, it’s a difficult area to search. I borrowed a metal detector and spent some time searching without any luck. I had never used a metal detector before, and I don’t have a lot of confidence that I was using it efficiently.”
I agreed with his assessment plus it was now May and attic temperatures were on the rise. Also I did not have the best equipment that I thought would locate the ring. I had the ATPro, but not the Sniper coil. A request went out to two clubs and a dealer for help in locating one I could buy or beg, borrow, or steal for a day. No luck! Then in October a new coil came into the dealer and I bought it. Three days later I was in the attic, on a nice cool morning, poking around in the deep insulation. It took about 10 minutes to search the 14 inch space between each set of ceiling joists. In the third area I got a repeatable signal close to a wire loop. I moved the loop and the signal was still there and so was the ring. Seconds later an emotional Keith had the ring on his finger. As I left, Keith was on the way to his mother’s house to show her the ring had been found.
Rick,
Thanks again for finding my wedding ring, I couldn’t be happier to have it again, and I owe it all to you. At times in the past few months I felt devastated over having lost the ring, but you brought what was needed and I’m so glad to have found it. I’m attaching the photos I took with my phone from the attic. I’m not sure they completely do it justice as the insulation was at least 2-3 feet deep in spots. And here is a recap of the story of the ring, please feel free to post about it on your blog:
My father passed away when I was 5 years old, and 30 years later my mother gave me his wedding ring to me to wear as my own wedding ring. My wife Christine thought it was a great idea to use the ring. The ring is engraved with my parent’s initials and wedding date. I have little memory of my father, and the ring helped to create a connection that was very important to me. In February of this year, during a healthy snow storm, I noticed a water stain on the bedroom ceiling and realized there was some type of roof leak. As you know, the leak was in a far corner of the attic, and I had to investigate the leak on my hands and knees partially buried in insulation. A few hours later I realized the ring had slipped off my finger at some point during the day. The most likely place for the ring was in the attic, and I made several search attempts in the area. I borrowed a metal detector, but having no experience with one, this attempt and all my attempts were fruitless. I thought it was gone for good, and it was then that despair would set in when I thought about having lost it. As I mentioned, it was extremely painful for me to tell my mother that I had lost this ring. But then we waited out the summer, you got the coil, got down on your hands and knees into the corner of the attic and found it. I didn’t tell my mother that you were coming to look, I didn’t want to create any false hope if we couldn’t find it. I was able to surprise her later on Sunday with the ring. I really can’t thank you enough for finding it.
Keith
Lost ring Celina, Ohio
All terrain water and land
Hello! My name is Josh Kimmel. I recently joined The Ring Finders. I am very involved with metal detecting and have a true passion for this hobby / lifestyle as well as a passion for recovering history in all of it’s forms. My passion for metal detecting goes beyond just merely trying to find pieces of the past, I also have a passion for helping others locate those special lost items that they thought may have been lost forever. That’s right!, I enjoying trying to help others find these items and strive to reunite people with their items. Jewelry such as class rings, wedding bands, engagement rings, gold, silver, platinum and other rings and jewelry to keys and even property markers. I have been asked to search for many different things and strive to do my best to locate them when possible. One of my favorite returns was of a silver and platinum class ring that had been lost for approx. 31 years when I one day found it and tracked the owner down to return it to her within 2 weeks. When people lose that precious, sentimental item it can be very distressing and I do what I can. Each lost item is unique and has a story of it’s own. When that item is lost by someone that story doesn’t have to end. With a recovery that story can continue.
If you are in the Celina, OH or Grand Lake St. Mary’s area or even the Ohio counties of Mercer, Auglaize, Van Wert, Allen and other outlying areas I just may be able to help. Why try to rent a metal detector or find a metal detector rental to try and locate your lost sentimental item or a particular metal item you would like found when you can contact a metal detector specialist that will use many years of experience as well as some of the best equipment to try and locate that item for you. Forget renting the detector and get a detectorist!
My years of experience and the equipment I use enable me to find and locate many different metal items in all terrains. Parks, private yards, school yards, tot lots, beaches, snow, water(up to 5ft deep), fields, woods, hillsides and anywhere else for that matter. Rings, jewelry, property markers, cache hunting, property searches and so on I’m always trying to help people with my experience. I even offer my services to Realtor s, Law enforcement, and insurace companies as well others and do what I can to help.
If you are in or around any of the above mentioned or surrounding areas of Ohio contact me and we can discuss the situation.
Metal Detecting For a Lost Rose Gold Wedding Band at UBC, Vancouver.
Today I was running around getting ready for a trip to the Rocky Mountains to Yoho National Park (10 hour drive) to look for a lost silver ring in 4 feet of water…Ice cold glacier water! I looked at the weather channel and it was snowing there today and a chance of flurries tomorrow…Of course I just sold my truck… I got home at 2pm today and started cooking a meal when I got a call from a young lady who lost her wedding band at UBC (University of British Columbia) She wanted to know if I could come out and find it for her…I was on my way!
It’s about a 45 minute drive to get there and when I arrived I was greeted by a young lady by the name of Noa. She walked me down to the location where she lost her ring and told me that she lost 2 rings but found 1 by looking around. The problem was there was long grass all around and the ring could easily be in the grass. I started my search and unfortunately there was lots of targets in this area…10 minutes later I heard that nice medium tone and I separated the grass and saw the rose gold ring glinting in the sunlight.
I will never get tired of my job because the smile is what makes what I do so special.
Thanks for reading my blogs…I love my job!
Lost your ring…Call ASAP!
Watch the video of the search below…
Newspaper Article – All’s Well that Ends Well – Webb Lake Lost Ring Search
Another publication in a local paper, the Burnett County Sentinel. They wrote up a nice article about our Webb Lake lost ring find. Click on the link below for the complete article.
http://www.presspubs.com/burnett/news/article_4346a47e-338a-11e4-8715-0019bb2963f4.html
