The Ring I Found on the Third Pass

By Gus Marchetti, Salvage master. Reviewed by Dana Whitcombe, technical reviewer.

Marine Salvage & Recovery | Hull & Bottom Cleaning October 12, 2019, a Thursday. We were working a gap in the grid over the wreck of the Island Queen, a 50-foot troller that went down in the channel off Port Esco back in the early 90s. Port Esco is a working harbor, not a tourist postcard. The client wanted to clear the site for a new cable crossing, and we had spent the morning running magnetometer lines across a barely visible wreck shape. The water was flat and gray, 50 degrees, and the boat's diesel smelled like burnt coffee. The tide was starting to turn, which meant we had maybe two hours left before the current picked up and made the sensor tow unstable. The first pass gave us nothing but a uniform mud bottom. The second, a faint bump on the side scan that could have been an old tire or a discarded fender. I decided to do one more, tighter, at a right angle to the first two. That's not always standard; you're supposed to work the grid and move on. But something about the anomaly bugged me. On the third pass, the magnetometer screamed. Huge spike. I threw a buoy overboard and marked the GPS. That's where the day changed.

Why the Third Pass

In salvage, the first pass finds the big stuff: the wrecks, the anchors, the tangled fishing gear. The second pass refines, but the third pass is where the small, easy-to-hide objects live. I've seen firsthand how a single pass can miss a metal object sitting in a depression or under a ledge. Currents shift sand, boat tracks leave shadows, and your own wake can push the sensor off line. On a good day, you cover a site three times from different angles and call it done. On a bad day, you learn why the first sweep missed a man's wedding ring. The third pass isn't about being thorough; it's about being humble enough to admit the water hides things better than you can find them.

The Target

From the sonar screen, the target was nothing special: a blurry lump, maybe two feet across, sitting in the shadow of a rock ledge. The magnetometer said it was ferrous, not just a rock, but the signal was narrow and intermittent, like a single point rather than a long anchor chain. I assumed it was a piece of chain, maybe an old crab pot buoy that had been dragged for years. The sonar shadow was hard to read; at that depth and sediment, it could have been a half-buried tire or a lost prop. But the magnetometer spike was crisp, the kind of signal you get from a solid iron or steel object. The coordinates put it at 35 feet, in a sand and rubble patch between two kelp beds.

The Dive

I suited up and went off the side. The water was cold enough to bite through a 7-mil suit, and the visibility was maybe 10 feet, which meant I was working blind by hand. I found the spot by descending on my own float, then leaving it out of the way so it wouldn't stir up silt. The first look down showed nothing but a gray blur. I settled on the bottom and did a circle search with my hands, because the silt was too dark to see anything more than a few inches away. My fingers hit a hard, smooth shape against a rock. I cleared the silt carefully, feeling for shape and edges. It was a ring. A gold ring, bent slightly, with an engraving on the inside. It was heavy, a man's band, and it slid off my pinky when I tried to put it on. I put it in my pouch and came up.

The Name

Back on board, I cleaned it up with a soft brush and fresh water. Inside, it said "J.T. & M.L. 1978" – a wedding date and initials. The name "J.T." matched a local fisherman, James Treloar, who had lost his ring somewhere off the dock in the late 90s. I recognized the name from a story in the local paper about a near-miss with a gillnetter, and the ring was something he mentioned in a quote. I made a few calls: first the marina, then a friend who knew the family, and finally his widow, Mary. She was in her sixties, still living in the same house. I drove over the next day. She cried when she saw it, not a loud cry, just tears. Her husband had lost it doing a tow out of the bay, and she'd never stopped hoping it would turn up. It had a tiny engraving of a salmon on the inside, his favorite fish.

The Lesson

That ring didn't need to be found. The cable company was paying for the site to be cleared, not for jewelry. But the third pass made the difference. To me, it's a reminder that in marine salvage, "good enough" often isn't. You have to run the extra line, make the extra sweep, because the most important thing on a site can be the size of a coin and half-buried in mud. Over the years, I've recovered lost anchors, trapped pots, and once a pair of sunglasses that belonged to a kid who fell off a dock. What I've learned is that the search isn't just about the object. It's about closing the loop for people. And sometimes, what you find isn't for the client. It's for the people who live with the water every day. That's what the local means. The sea doesn't give back everything, but it gave back that ring. For a moment, it made a widow remember a good day on the boat, and that's a bigger payload than any contract.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many passes do you normally run when searching a site? For a small target, at least three over the same area, at different angles and speeds. For a larger wreck, we might run a full grid, but we always do a confirmatory pass over any anomaly. What do you do with personal items you find? If there's identifying info, we try to find the owner or next of kin. If not, we report it to the client and the local authorities, and it goes through proper salvage documentation. How do you trace a ring like that? Jeweler's marks, initials, and the date give you a starting point. Local records, newspaper archives, and word of mouth with the marina community usually close the gap.