A Lower Mainland ring finder helped recover two lost rings from Mission lakes last week, delivering them to a pair of relieved spouses.
White Rock’s Chris Turner is the founder of Ring Finders, a worldwide directory of for-hire treasure hunters armed with metal detectors. He started his day out at Hayward Lake to help find a lost engagement ring.
He waded into the swimming area with his underwater metal detector, and within 30 minutes he’d found the lost ring. The woman broke into tears when he showed her his find, and gave him a hug.
“I love my job, it’s the best job in the world. I get to make people happy,” Turner says in a video, shortly before delivering the custom-made diamond ring to the couple of seven years.
“Those are hard to replace, it’s almost impossible to replace the sentimental value of that, so I’m very happy.”
Turner said he received an unexpected call from someone else in Mission while he was only four miles away.
He set out for Rolley Lake to look for a white-gold wedding band which slipped off the finger of a young man who’d only been married three months.
“The odds of that is incredible, that I’d already be two hours from home doing a search and receiving another search request only minutes from where I was,” Turner said.
This time the search was more difficult. The ring was lost in deep water, and the soft lake floor was covered in muddy debris. He spent over two hours searching with no luck, but met with the owner four days later for a more precise location.
“It’s extremely difficult, I’ve got wood branches – just full of branches and mud – so very hard to dig my targets,” Turner said.
But the next time out, he struck gold again within 30 minutes.
“These ones, sometimes I surprise myself, because I knew how difficult the search was going to be. I really needed him to be there to show me the specific area,” Turner said. “I got to tell you, I was as happy as he was when I saw (the ring) in my scoop.”
The job started as a hobby for Turner, but he turned it into a profession after being contacted by an angel investor. To date, the company has made 8,137 recoveries, an estimated $10 million in jewelry, according to the Ring Finders website.
Each ring finder posts a photo of their recoveries and a photograph of its owner. Turner films all his searches and posts the success stories to his YouTube account.
Turner works on a reward basis, “that means you pay what it’s worth to you and what you can afford to have me find your lost ring,” the website says. He doesn’t accept payment unless the ring is found.
“I’m a man with a metal detector and a desire to help people find what they have lost.”
– with files from AARON HINKS