Early last week I received a call from a lady named Heather in desperate need of help. Her and her husband were playing baseball catch in the back yard beneath an enormous shade tree. When they wrapped up their session she took her glove off and walked into her house when she suddenly realized her engagement ring and wedding band were both gone. Startled, she realized she had not taken them off her hand when she put her baseball glove on. She was pleased when she immediately found the engagement portion of the set inside the ball glove. The wedding band, however was missing.
The couple scoured the back yard for hours looking for the small gold band lined with diamonds the no avail. The next day she found our listing on TheRingFinders.com website and called. By that afternoon we were at her place ready to recover her precious wedding band.
My detecting partner Brett Thompson was along with me and we began searching the yard in a grid fashion. Luckily they knew the approximate location where the ring might be. About thirty minutes into the hunt, and having covered almost the entire area they had been playing, I began getting a little nervous. The couple emerged from their house and we began chatting.
"I think it is pretty cool you guys do this for people", Heather's husband said. He clearly couldn't sense my uneasiness.
"Yeah, well," I said. "We have been pretty successful finding rings....but," I said. "Unfortunately I am not batting 1000." I explained how many times when we don't find a ring I eventually get a phone call with the owner telling me they found it somewhere inside their house. However, they were very sure it was lost in the yard. So, I looked at Brett and told him that if we didn't find it after covering the last small suspected patch of ground, we would hit the whole thing again. I was determined to find the ring.
Not two seconds later, I got a solid reading on my Garrett Ace 400 detector. This is not the metal detector I typically hunt with, but it is an ideal detector for finding rings. Many times when you are on a ring recovery job once you get the signal you simply look down and see the ring. This ring was a small white-gold ring and it was covered by some dying grass along a well used path of the yard. It appeared to have been stepped on several times (likely by the family dogs) and was hard to spot at first.
The couple was talking with Brett who was only seconds away from finding the ring with his Minelab Vanquish 540 himself and did not even realize I got a signal. I knelt down, picked it up, and walked over to Heather. "Does this look like your wedding band?" She was ecstatic as was her husband. We got a chuckle out of how I had just jokingly questioned myself about my abilities.
The couple was very happy. When we do a job like this we typically allocate about an hour to recover the ring unless it is a large property and the person doesn't have an idea where they lost it. This recovery job only took 30 minutes. Our typical trip charge is around $60 which we had agreed upon with the option to offer a tip if she felt compelled to do so. Most of the time we get more than the trip charge. She pulled out an undisclosed amount of money and handed to me. "I really want you to have this." I did not count it, I simply thanked her graciously and bid the couple farewell.
This was an example of a successful recover for another very happy couple. We love these happy endings and the hobby that led us to be able to do good things for good people.
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