Auckland man Eddie Hayman was on a boat celebrating a friend's wedding off Waiheke Island on March 16, when he went for a swim and his wedding band came off in the water. Unable to find it himself, he searched online in a desperate attempt to find a way to retrieve it. He came across a group in NZ called Ring Finders who put Eddie on to Kyle and Dale who specialise in water detecting. Dale, Hayman and Kyle took Dales boat from Silverdale to Waiheke to start the search. No-one on the boat at the time the ring was lost had thought to record the coordinates of where it disappeared, so the group didn't know the specific location But a drone that was being used for filming on the boat when the ring went missing gave them an approximate GPS location. The ring was about seven metres down and the water was murky. After hours of trying to find the ring with no luck, we were about to give up when we decided to try one last time. We decided at the last minute to let quite a bit of anchor line out - mine is only a 5.75m boat, the boat Eddie was on when he lost the ring was some 60 feet. As soon as we did this – within minutes, Kyle detected the ring. With a slight fan of the silty sand, there it was. A big chunky gold and platinum ring exactly as described by Eddie. Finding the ring was an absolute buzz. The wedding ring was really sentimental to the guy. It was gold/platinum and had a diamond in it from his grandmother's ring. Kyle said the ring would never have been found if they hadn't been able to scuba dive with their metal detectors to look for it. It was incredibly lucky, to be honest. The whole trip to find the ring took about five hours. Eddie said he was really excited when he finally got the ring back. He played a joke on his wife when he got home, pretending they couldn't find it before dropping it into her hand. He later called his grandmother to let her know what had happened.
Kyle - Auskland, New Zealand
