The largest single genre of lost jewellery searches I perform are lost rings that slip off while throwing something at the beach. While I really enjoy searching for and finding rings in beach environments they do have some unique difficulties that make things interesting. 1. Salt water destroys electronics quickly
2. Waves and wind can make searching the surf zone extremely tricky (and sometimes a little dangerous)
3. It can be really busy on nice days, so physically getting to the search area is problematic.
4. Often the search can only be carried out at low tide.
It is this last issue that keeps coming up and makes logistics interesting for finding some items. Usually (Adelaide is a bit weird with this) there are two low tides a day around 12 hours apart. These times are just about never convenient to organise time off work, so balancing a 9-5 job with jewellery rescue is a real challenge.
Until now, I have managed to juggle these commitments, but for the near future I am going to see if I can concentrate on metal detecting full time. There is no way I could financially survive just with jewellery searches at $50, so I am going to supplement that income with metal detector retail sales and the random coins I find.
Not sure if this is going to work while I try to keep the service costs down as low as possible, but happy to have a go 🙂
The low tide quandary came up this week when I needed to search for a ring at Seacliff during low tide. Unfortunately the lowest tide was 11.30PM, so I spent from 10.30pm to 12.30am down there with the beach all to myself. It was certainly beautiful and peaceful, but no joy this time as i failed to find the ring.