Hey, here is a find of a lifetime at Mount Maunganui.
A couple holidaying at the Mount posted on Facebook that they had lost an Emerald cut diamond ring in the surf the day before and wondered if anyone with a metal detector might be able to help find it. Anyone who has tried detecting in the surf will know the chances of finding anything is not great. We have a Minelab Ctx3030 so the best option in our opinion.
The husband had been given the job of looking after the 2 1/2 carat Dimond ring and in his wisdom took in swimming. He gave us a pretty big area about 300 Mtrs long and somewhere in the water. We arrived just before low tide and decided to swing the coil in knee deep water. With waves washing through some above waist high what were our chances, most would say slim at best. After about an hour I got a patchy signal but as we all know dig every signal. We have a home made Stainless steel scoop so I pin pointed it and my son had 1/2 a dozen scoops containing sand and pipies only.
Another detectorist came over and pretty much told us we didn’t know what we were doing and that was just salt giving that tone. She even stuck her detector ( not a CTX or Minelab) into the hole declaring there was nothing there.
As she talked to the husband I swapped the detector for the scoop and My Son Oscar pinpointed it using the CTX and told me to dig right in front of the coil. I patiently waited for a lull in the waves and dug as deep as I could……lifting the scoop above the waves and there it was a $50,0000 diamond ring with the shank sticking out of the sand in the scoop.
I grabbed it out of the scoop and handed it to the owners husband. We were invited to the holiday home to meet the wife as she was reunited with a very expensive but also very sentimental piece of jewellery. Still can’t quite believe it.
We were rewarded with a very generous finders fee and met some lovely people. Does anyone know of a more valuable find in NZ.
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I did a recovery some years back of a buried gold bullion cache. 1oz .999 NZ Mint Gold Kiwis, which was a conservative quarter million back then. Short story: couple moved out to NZ, cashed up their retirement into bullion. House kept getting burgled and flooded so they moved the stash out to the orchard and buried it. 10 years later, the orchard had gone along with the apple tree under which the cache lay. From memory, they had spent about a week with metal detectors and spades and the place looked like the Somme. This was just one of the two jars and held 60 coins alone.
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