I'm Dave. I find lost rings.

How this started

I spent thirty-one years as a physical education teacher. When I retired I needed something to do with my time that got me outdoors and kept me useful, and metal detecting turned into exactly that — first as a hobby, then as something people started calling me about.

The first time I handed a wedding ring back to someone who had given up on ever seeing it again, I understood what the job actually was. It isn't about metal. Nobody cries over the resale value of eight grams of gold. They cry because the object carries forty years of their life in it.

How I work

My wife works with me, and between us we've handled everything from a ring in six feet of water at Mondo's Beach to a set of hydraulic press dies on a hillside above Fillmore. She's the one who helped me insure and mail an engagement ring back to a client in Switzerland who'd already left California.

I'm a member of The Ring Finders, an international directory of independent metal detecting specialists. Every member works on the same reward basis: you decide what a successful recovery was worth to you.

What I carry

A Minelab Manticore detector, a long-handled CKG sand scoop and a pinpointer. The detector gets the attention, but the scoop is the piece amateurs never anticipate — locating a target and actually retrieving it from collapsing wet sand while waves refill the hole are two completely different problems.

Writing it down

After enough recoveries I started writing them up properly, under the name I'm known by in the detecting world — The Metal Detective. The first one out is FOUND, a devotional, because after years of looking for lost things it got hard not to notice the pattern. A second one about the craft itself is in revision. Both are here.

I've been doing this for fourteen years now, and I've lost count of the recoveries. The part that actually stays with me isn't a number anyway — it's a woman crying on a beach at dawn over eight grams of gold.

What I believe about this job

Three things, mostly. That the phone call matters more than the equipment — good information beats a big search grid every time. That the tide chart decides beach searches, not the clock or my convenience, which is why I've started searches at 3:30 in the morning. And that people deserve an honest answer about the odds before they spend any money, even when the honest answer costs me the job.

That last one is why the pricing page says there's a $75 call-out fee that applies whether or not I find your ring, rather than something catchier. It's all written out plainly here.