I had a distress call the other day from a guy who had lost
his ring in the sea. Apparently he is a
canoeist and was upside down in the water performing an Eskimo roll when his
heavy silver ring fell off his finger.
All credit to the man as despite his situation at the time, he did
manage to work out where he had lost the ring with some accuracy, it transpired.
I met him the next day at low tide, when he showed me where
he thought he had lost the ring. This
was on the sloping part of the beach not far below the high tide line and we
thought the ring would have rolled or been washed down on to the flat part of
the beach, where stones are dropped and accumulate. I was using my preferred beach detector, an old
Minelab Sovereign XS2A Pro, fitted with a 15 inch WOT coil, which gives good
and fast coverage, good discrimination and good depth. The guy was also searching diligently – eyes
only. We must have spent more than half
an hour on this patch before I decided to start again at the loss point,
searching up and down the beach from the high tide line, over the pebble patch
and a few yards out into the muddy sand.
I figured that if the ring was going to be carried, then this would be
in the direction of long-shore drift to the west and spent another half hour
searching up and down in that direction.
As I felt I was too far away from the loss spot by then I returned to
the loss spot and followed the same procedure in an easterly direction. After around twenty minutes a sharp signal
revealed the ring at two inches deep in the sandy slope, ten yards to the east
and five yards above the supposed loss spot.
So I guess the ring had gone more or less straight into the
sandy bottom and stayed there. Had I
realised that, I could have found the ring in less than half the time by
initially circling the suspected loss spot and once the high tide line had been
reached, switching to a ‘U’ pattern sweep from the high tide line, out to sea,
under the loss spot and back up to the high tide line on the other side. Nevertheless, it was one happy bunny who went
home with his ring that afternoon.
