It was another weekend like any other. My good buddy Lee and I load up our gear (Excals, scoops, etc) and hit what few lake beaches we have in our area. There are so few beaches here and so many people with detectors that most times it is hard to find anything really nice without having to travel fairly far from home. But not this day! Our group of friends all love the stories of Mel Fisher and his discoveries of the Atocha and 1715 fleet so every time we go water detecting we always yell Today's The Day! before we get in. Most times it doesn't help, but on this day at this particular beach it was one of those where there was almost zero trash. So few tones that when you do finally get one it scares the heck out of you and makes you about jump out of your shoes. The very target was hardly a tiny "whip" sound. I decided to take a scoop off and it gotta little better but still not great. After 2 more deep scoops a standing liberty quarter came up in the scoop, 1926! I couldn't believe that old of a coin was still buried in that beach after 30 years of being hit with detectors. Nothing but modern coins after that for about an hour. Then all of a sudden I got a good tone. One of those deep low smooth as butter tones where you just say out loud "Oh yeah...". I could tell it wasn't deep. I took a small scoop and laying on the bottom of my scoop was a lot of sparkling stones, a multi-diamond wedding ring! I could tell just by the first glance it was going to be real and super nice. It had a main stone slightly larger than 1/3 carat with two good sized side stones, blue in color, which I thought were sapphires. Then down both sides 10 more diamonds increasing in size as they go down. The paper appraisal ended up being $2700 and those two blue stones were actually diamonds as well treated blue. Blue diamonds, how cool! But that was not the end of the day detecting, about 15 minutes after the big ring I could another tone, not quite as low and didn't sound that great at all honestly. After a few deep scoops up came yet another diamond wedding band! I couldn't believe it. This one was a much smaller 10k band with tiny diamonds but a gold diamond ring nonetheless. We don't get many days like that around my neck of the woods and it was definitely a fun day and a rush. Today was finally the day!
Jason - IL, USA.
