February 10th, 2010 by Brad Lovell

Narrabeen Lagoon

I always enjoy a challenge when it comes to metal detecting. Some jobs are simple, and it literally takes me minutes to recover the lost item. But this has been a tough summer for the “Metal Detector Man”! Under water jobs are always difficult for too many reasons and variables to list. Which means my recovery rate for such jobs it low. I always mention this to my customers before starting a new job. I am not trying to talk myself out of business, but I like to be realistic. Here are some jobs below which had disappointing endings..

• Sam was attending a wedding that myself and Layne Beachley had to sneak around to get to a harbour side beach her ring was lost. The word soon spread via the wedding guests that Layne Beachley had lost her engagement ring, and she had hired the metal detector man to try and find it. The following weekend, Sam was at his friends holiday home throwing a ball in waist deep water. After diving for the ball, Sam believes this could have been the point when the ring fell off. I drove up to the central coast (Bonnels Bay) to search for Sam’s lost wedding ring. After a good 3 hour search covering the area with both my metal detectors, we decided to call it quits.
• Jan had this misfortune of losing the keel off her boat in the dirty Parramatta River. Jan knew of the area where she believed the keel to have dropped. Because it was a metal keel, I decided I could try searching for it with my under water metal detector. It wasn’t until I arrived to the spot I realised how bad the conditions we’re. The water was literally brown…with zero visibility. In fact I could not even see my air gauge pushed up against my mask. Anyway, I wasn’t going to let this stop me…I did my usual 360 degree rope search covering a 20 meter diameter. A few big signals but none of them the keel. After a couple of hours searching in darkness I ran out of air. If anyone has an idea or a service which could help Jan recover her 250 kilo keel, please contact me!
• Paula lost her diamond engagement ring at Narrabeen Lagoon. I actually had 2 attempts at this job, but could not perform the search with any sort of efficiency while my underwater detector was in for repairs. My 3rd attempt was a couple of weeks later, armed with my repaired detector. After completing both a north-west, and east west grid search of the area following my ropes, I was not able to find Paula’s engagement ring. If any metal detector guys to manage to find a diamond wedding ring at Narrabeen Lagoon, please contact me. Paula is more than happy to offer a generous reward.

June 12th, 2009 by Brad Lovell

I received a phone call from Michael last Friday morning. Michael had lost his wedding ring while playing football at an oval in Engadine, about an hour drive south of Sydney. Fortunately for me, Michael felt the ring fall off his finger as he was passing the ball…so he had an idea of the area the ring could have dropped. Being a public area, I told Michael I would be there as soon as I could. I organised to meet Michael’s wife Kim at the football oval that evening. I had Tony from Metal Detecting Services with me from the previous job, and he said he would be happy to help out again with this particular job. Kim showed us the area her husband believed his lost gold wedding band to be, and we got straight to work. Tony began to cover one half of the search area, while I hunted the other. To be honest, I figured this job would take 20 minutes at most with both of us covering the area. But as it turned out we spent almost 2 hours searching before I stumbled upon the lost ring. The ring was actually a good distance from the area Kim showed us, which is often the case. We we’re both very happy to return the Ring to Kim and get back into our warm cars. Once again, I want to thank Tony from Metal Detector Services for helping out with this job. If it wasn’t for you I would probably have been in the freezing cold for another 2 hours.