There used to be a picnic area there and the bridge was build in the early 1920's so I was hoping to find coins from that period - which I did. I found two mercury head dimes, and lot of wheat pennies. I became pretty familiar with the sounds that the unit made, this particular unit didn't have a meter on it - tone recognition only.
In 2003 I moved to Hawaii - my son invited me to come over and stay with him for a while so I shipped my belongings and my detector. Being resort beaches I was hoping to find lots of jewelry and whatever. I would go out early in the morning to the beaches before the crowds came out. There were certain beaches where I knew the majority of the tourists went and I searched those beaches the most. I wasn't having very good success finding anything of value, but found a lots of old room resort keys, old tent equipment - metal stakes - lots and lots of aluminum pop tabs and bottle caps, but no success at finding anything valuable.
Over the weeks that I detected the beaches I found one very expensive diamond & and platinum ring. One that looked just like it is shown here.
The ring was found at the water line during low tide, the coil was submerged. As fast as I could dig a hole it filled up on me. Finally after a lot of very fast digging - I was using a plastic scoop - I finally got down deep enough that the scoop pulled up enough sand with the object inside. After sifting through the sand, to my surprise, was this beautiful diamond and platinum ring.
I didn't know what to do. I realized at the time that the ring had been in the water a long time. The setting was quite bent in. 3-stone channel set. No stones were missing. I felt I should go report the finding of the ring. But I didn't. Being my first find of any value I was so happy and so excited, I instantly took the ring down to the local pawn shop and had it appraised. It was appraised at $3k and I eventually sold to the pawn shop for $1500. After that there was another long session of recovering nothing until one day I was back at the water line using the same detector and this time I recovered a silver and garnet ring, with the aid of the sand scoop. All and all I had a great time and the detector paid for itself many times over.
Thanks Accurate for the great recommendation!
Mark McIntyre
