Jan 6th 2003 I received the following email:

I am in a horrible jam. I lost my wedding band between my house and my car….I looked for hours and I cant seem to find it. I wonder if some one from your group could possibly help me find it…. I can’t offer much but I would be happy to give 50 bucks. I know this is not much but we just got married and still kind of hard to make ends meet. I live in Stratford NJ ….if you could possible help me or maybe point me to some how could….

I contacted this person and planned to meet the next day. Around 930 am in 20 degree F temp and snow on the ground we met. I knew he didn’t trust me because he wanted to follow me all around. I asked the usual questions, when, where and how do you think you lost it. He said he was late for work and ran out of the house.

He said he felt the ring coming off his finger while he was running from his house to his car, so he closed his fist to keep the ring on. When he got to the car the ring was gone. He said it was white gold. He showed me his path of travel. I told him I would do a grid pattern of the whole front yard.

I search up & down finding everything under the sun except the ring. He was questioning all of the target registering on my XLT. I was trying to explain the different targets, like this is probably a penny at 6 inches. I could see the skepticism in his face.

No ring in that direction, so I said I will do the same thing going back and forth. Still no ring. I told him I would try a different coil. He said he had to go make a few phone calls. So I went to my car to switch coils from my 6 inch to the 10 inch coil.

At this point I was there for about an hour and even though I had gloves on my hands were frozen. So I was attaching the new coil when I looked down and saw the ring sitting there so nice and pretty. It was sitting less than 2 inches from a sewer pipe (no wonder my XLT didn’t find it). So I picked it up and put it on my finger.

I knocked on the door and held my finger up. You would not believe the look on his face!! I showed him where I found it, there was still a depression in the snow where it was located. I explained why the machine didn’t find it. I had a smile on my face the rest of the day.

Dave Milsted