Today is my mom’s birthday. She helped me with a recovery today.

Angela contacted me earlier in the week, asking if I could help her find three pendants from a necklace. She was at a wedding in Wildwood last weekend and lost the very sentimental items.

She is a nurse and has odd hours as I do. We decided to meet on Sunday morning, my mom’s birthday. The weather forecast was not looking good with rain and wind predicted before sun up. Angela asked if the rain would be a problem. I told her that I would be there rain or shine.

I got there about a half an hour early, no rain but I did see a beautiful sunrise. Thanks, mom! Angela arrived and showed me the area of the crime. The wedding reception was at the Star Beach Bar in Wildwood Crest. She was around the fire pit, a cabana, and sat in the couches. There has been a lot of wind at the beach this week, so there was a lot of sand drifts around the cabanas and tables.

She said last weekend she and her friends searched, including removing the cushions from the chairs. It’s a good thing as the chairs have been removed for the winter. They also raked the beach. They only found a few coins.

I started a grid search. I expected to find a lot of bottle caps. I was amazed only to have found one. I found a lot of coins. I guess Angela was getting frustrated that I hadn’t found her precious items, so she started to walk around.

I heard a scream. My first thought was an animal came from under one of the cabanas scaring Angela. I went over to find out what happened. Here she found the smallest pendant of the three we were looking for. It looks like the wind had blown all of the sand off of the pendant. It was just sitting on the top of the sand.

So now I had a place to continue the search. The only problem was it was next to the cabana, and it had wood & metal framework. So every time I swung my detector it went off. Angela found a shovel and a rake. I started to shovel large amounts of sand away from the cabana and detect the piles.
Finally, I received a good hit and found the silver pendant.

The last pendant is mostly jade with just a little bit of 14k gold on it. A new strategy, set my detector up to search for gold nuggets. After about 15 more minutes of digging and detecting, we found what we were looking for. Angela was amazed and I got a very big hug. I love my hobby!

Ten minutes after I got into my car for the journey home it started to pour. Thanks for the help mom, and Happy Birthday!!