Tag: Beach

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Finding Zsófia’s ring at Henley Beach

I was just settling into a quiet evening at home last night when Henley Beach Surf Club phoned around 7.30 asking if I could possibly help a couple near the jetty.
Turned out Zsófia had lost her ring 20 or 30 metres out in chest high water and was very concerned about the bad weather due later.
I grabbed some water proof detecting gear and headed down there to see if I could help.
Once I finally got down to Henley from Hillcrest I found Zsófia and headed out to where her husband Danka was trying to dive down and find the ring, dropped a marker in the water at roughly where they thought the ring was and started work.
I searched about 15m north/ south and about the same east/ west but unfortunately didn’t find the ring before nightfall. The tides looked fairly good for Friday afternoon so I suggested I head back there around midday and try again with the ring possibly out of the water or maybe just in shallow water.

So today I headed back to Henley Beach about 40 minutes before low tide and worked the area again which was in shallow water and worked back up the beach a bit into only shin deep water when I was rewarded with a loud (so shallow) mid tone (where I would expect gold to be) and was able to just lean down and pull the ring out from about 2″ under the sand. I was only searching for 15 minutes or so after sticking a plastic bag over my dry non-waterproof gear in some serious rain.
I wasn’t sure it was the right ring so sent a pic to Zsófia and received an elated and relieved phone call back 🙂 It has now been picked up and is back where it belongs 🙂

Sophia's Wedding RIng
Sophia’s ring back with her
Ring and metal detector
Sophia’s ring and the Minelab Sovereign GT
Sophia's ring and the Coiltek WOT used to find it
Sophia’s ring and the Coiltek WOT used to find it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gear used was a Tesoro Sand Shark last night in the water and the Sovereign GT and big coil today.

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Happy new year and a white gold ring trifecta

Happy New Year everyone and best wishes for a loss free 2017.

2016 ended a little disappointingly for me with a search for 3 rings on Friday at Somerton Park. Unfortunately the rings probably ended up somewhere in the surf zone a few days after that big storm stripped sand from the beach. The combination of pounding waves and the beach re-filling with sand after the storm meant that the rings were going to be deep and difficult to track down.

After learning a bit about how they were lost I methodically checked a roughly tennis court sized area gridding north/ south and east/ west. After a couple of hours I picked up a whisper of a signal near the water and dug out one ring at around 12″ deep. So 1/3 and pushing towards impossibly deep.

After another hour I gave up, having not received any worthwhile signals. We had a chat about the best way forward and decided to leave it for some better weather and/ or less sand and headed home.

Saturday was another adventure trying to find a new Apple watch lost in the Murray. After about 10′ deep the water was pitch black and after only about 20 minutes dive time I pulled the pin on the search as too dangerous, too small chance of success and the location a little too ambiguous given the conditions. Signals were everywhere with all the fishing sinkers, metal rubbish etc next to a boat ramp so I had to manually check each signal by hand at up to 15′ in sightless conditions. Just too hard.

So, today I received a call from Tony that the sand/ weather back at Somerton Park was more favourable and it might be worth catching up again for another look. I tuned the Minelab Sovereign GT with every possible setting to get a little extra depth and searched extremely slowly near where the first ring was found. Ring pull, ring pull, … and so on then the slightest change in threshold (background hum) on the detector, not a beep, just a tiny change of note. I decided to dig it and pulled the wedding band out from somewhere around 14″ down- crazy. So 2/2 rings.

Having found the 2 rings now reasonably close to each other I doubled down and did what I could to drag every bit of performance out of the detector and myself. Eventually I nearly missed an even slighter signal, not even a whisper, just a hint of a nulling of the tone. I normally would not have dug this signal but did this time due to it being fairly close to where I found the second ring. Dig, dig, dig, dig … 10″, 11, 12, 13, somewhere near 15″. I kept losing that tiny signal and re-finding it. Eventually I scooped up that 3rd ring at a ridiculous depth thanks to the incredible Sov GT and 15″ Coiltek Manufacturing WOT coil.

I have a feeling the ring owners had given up on them a bit so I couldn’t be happier to return those 3 rings back to Kim. A real challenge pushing machine and me to absolute limits with a lot of luck and the sea/ weather cutting me a bit of slack. Great feeling.

white gold rings
Kim’s rings back where they belong
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Necklace at Henley Beach

For a sunny day today was very quiet then the phone rang with a dropped necklace just north of Henley Jetty. I let dinner go cold and headed down there ASAP. They were quite surprised to see me 30 minutes or so after the call and explained what happened.

He lost it while flicking the towel at the end of the beach session. Fortunately he took a photo of the rocks up on the break water so we had a reasonable idea where he was. The search area ended up being only 20m by about 30m.

lent I started at the wet sand knowing that he wouldn’t have laid in the damp and gridded my way up towards the rocks. I picked up 3 dodgy signals (too deep) and after about 15 minutes detected a nice low (expected) tone on the Sovereign GT.

I had my little wand like Pro Pointer on me, so turned it on and prodded the ground to get a nice strong reaction. Obviously there was something only a couple of inches under the surface of the sand

I just reached over, raked the sand with my fingers and pulled the really nice necklace out of the sand, held it up to show him and was greeted with a massive, relieved smile 🙂

I was even offered a hug

I LOVE this job:)

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Logistics of Beach Detecting

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.