Bob's Ring

Bob is a guy that I used to dive and detect with for years. We worked together but I have not even seen him since we retired.

Bob is a quiet guy and I have never, ever seen him mad or raise his voice. I could tell you story's about our diving trips and such but they could not be posted on this forum :D
In Nam Bob was one of those crazy guys that would go far forward and live with the natives and radio back intel. Meeting him you would never guess but he got me drunk one night :D and that loosened his tounge. One would never believe it from such a calm person. Maybe that is what was needed.

There is a park in our area, Kensington Metor Park. Kent lake is a huge sprawling impoundment with lots of open land and lakes. During the summer there are many thousands of people on the beach on any given day. It is beautiful.

We had never been to the park before but it was fall and we figured there had to be many lost items on the beach area.

We drove out to the area and found that we could not get on the beach because they were grooming the beach area. They asked us to come back another time. I asked if there were any more beaches in the area and was told there was an overflow beach on the other side of the expressway.

An overthrow beach is an area that is normally used if the main beach is full. This one was a small lake, which was a gravel pit at one time. They are usually no deeper than 30 ft or so and the water is usually clear.

We found our way to the other side of the expressway and down to the beach area. We walked up to the beach and looked things over. It was nice and sandy but we could see that the dropoff was only about 20 ft from shore. That means not much of a beach area but it is what we had to deal with. It was not a place where parents would take kids but young adults would love it.

I backed the truck to the waters edge and we started offloading and gearing up. We were using my hookah, which has two hoses and would supply the two of us for a couple hours.

We got into our diving gear, unreeled our hooka hoses and cranked up the motor. The hooka has a three horse gasoline motor and is fairly quiet. You can hear it on the bottom but it is like it is a mile off. I guess the way to discribe it is that you are not aware of it but you know when it quits. I have had it quit four or five times.

Bob and I cleared our masks by spitting in them and smearing the saliva around and rinsing it out. This keeps them from fogging up. We then turned on the detectors and nodding to eachother, droped into the water and kicked for the drop.

This was a very sharp drop! It had to drop at about a 70 degree angle all the way to the bottom. This can be a problem.

We split up a bit and Bob went right and I went left. We headed for the bottom and when we reached it we turned around and faced the drop, settleing on our knees and looking up toward the surface. Nice :D

I started working my detector on the sandy drop and started getting hits right away. The problem is with a sandy drop like that it is very hard to recover the target. As you dig the target, the sand just cascades down from above and covers the target. You dig and dig and it just keeps coming down in an avalanch. If you have a bank of sand of 20 ft or so it can be tough.

A trick I use is to dig below it. Lets say I have a target and it sounds good, I will go down three feet, face the sand bank and dig there, all the time watching the spot that I got the hit. I will dig and dig and let the sand cascade down and many times the sand will just fall off the target. You have to be fast because as soon as you see it you have to be ready to grab and grab fast or it will just follow the sand. I have made hundreds of recoveries that way but you miss some. I lost one heck of a bunch of them before I came onto this trick.

Bob swam over to me and watched what I was doing and just nodded, gave me the thumbs up and swam off.

I found a bunch of stuff but have no idea what it was. It was a long time ago and I never did keep track of my finds. I know there was some jewlery and lots of clad but the object of this story is BObs find and what the dumbarse did :D

We finally came to the surface and made our way to the truck, which was backed to the water with tailgate down. We dumped our goody bags onto the tailgate, after pulling off our gear and looked over our finds. It is hard to tell what you really got while on bottom. You are consentrating on hunting and the finds will sort themselves out after we reach shore.

I don't remember that I found anything exciting, lots of finds but nothing special. I looked at Bobs pile and he had an equal pile. He was holding something in his hand and holding it up to the light. It was a ring.

I asked what he had and he said, "Just a ring" I looked and said, "Lemme see" It was a huge mans ring and was covered with little diamonds in a spiral pattern.There were 24 diamonds on it! I wish I still had a picture of it! It was beautiful. I looked on the inside and it was 18k. Bob asked, "I wonder if those are diamonds or glass" I told the dang fool that the don't put glass jewels in an 18k ring! He just looked it over and put it in his bag. That is excitement for Bob. :D It was one of the most beautiful mens rings I have ever seen.

A few days later I saw Bob at work. I asked him if he had cleaned the ring up yet and he said he had. I asked him to bring it in to work so I could see it.

The next day he brought it in and handed it to me. Man that 18k gold is just beautiful when polished up but where the hell were the diamonds? I asked Bill, "Where the hell are the dang diamonds?" He said, "Here are the ones I could find" and handed me a sandwitch bag.

I asked what the heck had happened to the rest. He sorta laughed, like a moron will :D and said they are in his garage. I asked, "What the hell you mean, in your garage?" He added, "Somewhere" with a goofy arsed grin.

It seems that he used his grinder,with a polishing wheel and buffed the ring with jewelers rouge. He said he had to put safty glasses on so because things were fying off and hitting him. It was diamonds! That dang fool buffed all the diamonds off the dang ring and they flew all over the dang garage! the few he had in the bag were the only ones he could find.

I just shook my head. That is my buddy Bob :D