Faced with evacuation orders as Hurricane Milton neared landfall on Florida's west coast, Melissa Martin quickly packed the family cars with their most important personal items.
She remembered taking off her gold-and-platinum wedding band and placing it in her pocket as she tended the fish in her aquarium, but when she checked for the ring later that day, it wasn't there.
When the threat had passed and Martin was allowed to return home, she searched tirelessly for her ring. She searched inside her home. She searched the front yard. She even searched the edge of her neighbors yard, to no avail.
Martin feared that the ring she wore every day for the past 25 years would be gone forever.
"It really means the world to me," she told Tampa's CBS affiliate, WTSP.
Three months had passed when Martin was scrolling her Facebook feed and noticed a post about Steve Thomas, a local metal-detector enthusiast with a stellar record for finding the unfindable.
She reached out and he was ready to help. Thomas' home base is in Dunedin, just a 15-minute drive to Seminole, where Martin lives.
He called Melissa to set up a search.
"And what I do when I come over, I have that individual recreate what they thought they were doing when they lost their ring," Thomas said.
Thomas gathered a few clues.
According to Thomas' Ring Finder blog, Martin had made a number of trips to place personal items in the cars before evacuating. She also walked next door to check with her neighbors to see if they might secure their trash cans. Martin also remembered kicking something in the driveway that she thought at the time was a rock.
Armed with this information, Thomas targeted the yard in front of the house. Within a half hour he scored a reading of 71-72 on his Minelab Equinox 900 detector.
He probed the area with his handheld pinpointer and spotted the reflective edges of Martin's two-tone ring, which was half-buried in the grass.
Thomas knocked on Martin's door. When she opened it, he announced, "I think I found what we were looking for!"
"We walked over and I pulled the ring out of the grass where it had laid for over three months," Thomas wrote. "I handed it to her and Melissa began crying tears of joy."
"Oh, I cried," she told WTSP. "We were hugging, crying — it was such a wonderful moment."
Thomas is a member of The Ring Finders, a loosely knit network of more than 1,000 members in 25 countries. Each member shares a love of metal detecting and reuniting people with their cherished keepsakes. The group’s website claims that members have recorded more than 14,583 successful recoveries since it was founded 16 years ago.
Thomas charges nothing for his services, but he told The Jeweler Blog that he accepts rewards, which go right into a college fund that he established for his two grandsons, ages 2 1/2 and 9 months.
"For me, the first 'rush' comes with the find and the second one comes when I give the ring back to its owner," Thomas wrote on his blog. "This never gets old!"
Credits: Photo of Martin's wedding ring in the grass and photo of Martin with her ring courtesy of Steve Thomas. Screen captures of Thomas working the front yard via YouTube / 10 Tampa Bay.