In October 2011 I received a phone call from Mr Mel Austin telling me he had mislaid his wedding ring while gardening at his house in Beanacre Wiltshire. Mr Austin is a keen guitarist and his ring finger had developed a “trigger finger” and become painfully swollen. Due to this he had had the wedding ring made larger which had lead to it falling off. Coincidentally, this year, I had just started wearing my wedding ring again having had it made larger due to the same condition.
I visited Mr Austin the same day and it took only a matter of 20 minutes to find the ring at the bottom of a pile of tree branches and twigs he had been gathering the previous weekend at a site he thought the ring might be. He had already reported the ring lost to his insurance company and the police. As you can imagine he was very pleased to get the ring back but was embarrassed to have to “undo” the paperwork with his insurers.
Imagine my surprise today when, out of the blue, I received another phone call from Mr. Austin who reported the same ring lost having carried out a similar task in the garden – this time gathering up the autumn leaves two days before. This time he got in touch with me before reporting the ring lost, but had no pre-conceived ideas where the ring might be.
We spent an hour going over every inch of his garden where he knew he had been raking and handling the leaves with no luck. I did get some promising signals but at too great a depth for them to be the ring however. We marked the spots and Mr. Austin thinks he will investigate these later.
Having finished the garden we moved on to a corner of a neighbouring piece of farm land where Mr. Austin has permission to dump has garden waste. The main pile of leaves was in the middle of a clump of nettles and it was here, after only a few seconds of detecting I got a signal in the correct range. Transferring to my Pro Pointer I located the signal, removed a few layers of leaves and there was the ring shining brightly in the sunlight!
I managed to persuade Mrs. Austin to take a photo. Mr. Austin was happy to pay the newly introduced £10 fee to cover petrol costs plus a bonus which I will donate to charity and, after a celebratory cup of tea I departed saying “See you next year, same time, same place.....”!
Ray Case