Man finds couple’s engagement ring with a metal detector nearly a month after they lost it in the sand on a Costa Rican beach
- Doug Cotty, 29, and his fiancée Michele Arias, 30, were vacationing in Costa Rica when they lost her engagement ring on a beach on December 11
- Cotty put the ring in his top pocket but it disappeared after he took his top off
- The couple issued a Facebook appeal asking locals to help them find it
- An American expat saw the appeal and combed the area using a metal detector
- He found the treasured ring almost a month later and told Michele via Facebook
- She cried upon receiving the news and will return a new ring they bought
A newly engaged woman was overjoyed when a man found her engagement ring on a Costa Rican beach one month after her fiance lost it there.
Doug Cotty, 29, and his fiancée Michele Arias, 30, were vacationing in Costa Rica on December 11 and were on the beach observing baby olive ridley sea turtles nesting in the sand.
Cotty put the ring in his tank top pocket for safe-keeping but had taken the top off and hung it on the branch of a tree as he applied sunscreen.
Michele Arias (left) and Doug Cotty (right) were devastated when their engagement ring disappeared on a beach while vacationing in Costa Rica
The custom-made piece built around a one-carat diamond had been in Cotty’s mother’s family for generations and he paid $4,400 for a new stone for it
The couple were then left devastated when the custom-made piece built around a one-carat diamond that had been in his mother’s family for generations was no longer there.
They subsequently spent hours searching for the treasured item but to no avail.
But Michele was ecstatic when she received a Facebook message from an American expat living in Costa Rica on January 9 saying: ‘I just found your ring!!!!!!’
‘Complete and utter shock, and disbelief,’ Arias said of the moment she saw Harris’s message.
-
Iowa man, 93, is reunited with his diamond-studded wedding…
‘There wasn’t a dry eye in the room’: Tearjerking moment…
Share this article
She told The Charlotte Observer: ‘I was like, Are you sure? Like, you really did? I cannot believe this.’
‘He said: “I’ll send you a picture. I’m not very good with the phone, so I’m gonna send a picture when I get back home.”
‘I waited maybe another 15 minutes or so and he sent me a picture, and I was like — I mean, honestly, I was like, Holy s**t. He found it. Then I immediately texted Doug, and he said the same thing.
She added: ‘I thought it was a prank at first. I’m like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait! Who sent you this?? Who sent you this photo??.
Cotty proposed at a lookout point near the top of Irazú Volcano at the start of their vacation in Costa Rica in December
Michele Arias (pictured) issued a desperate Facebook appeal asking for help in locating the ring
‘Just thinking maybe someone Photo shopped it or something. Like, ‘Oooooo, I have it! Send me a reward!’ But no, this was real.’
Arias had posted a plea to a Facebook group for residents of Costa Ballena, the southern Pacific region of Costa Rica that includes Playa Chamán, explaining their misfortune and asking people to spread the word.
‘We are hoping someone found it and is holding onto it so we can possibly get it back,’ she wrote.
David Harris, an American expat living in Costa Rica found the ring with a metal detector on the beach one month later
One user mentioned a man named David Harris, who is known to help beach-goers find missing items using a metal detector.
Harris is a 67-year-old American expat who spent more than two decades as a firefighter in Atlanta, where one of his specialties was using underwater metal detectors as leader of a rescue diving team.
He had sent Arias several Facebook messages offering help to find her ring but she didn’t get them as the messages had been diverted to a spam folder.
She then checked the folder and saw Harris messages, explaining that she would be grateful if he had a look for it in the area where it went missing.
In the meantime the couple went ahead and bought another new diamond ring.
On January 9, Harris claimed that he was struck by a feeling that he should go take a look on the beach.
So he dusted off his metal detector, headed to the store to buy new batteries, then went to the location she’d described to him.
He told the Charlotte Observer: ‘I probably had searched for 20 minutes, maximum.
‘I picked up several Costa Rican coins, and of course a lot of beer caps and nails and stuff — which, on a metal detector, is a really dull thud kind of a noise.
Arias (pictured) was finally reunited with the ring 40 days after it went missing in Costa Rica
A screenshot of the message Harris sent to Arias telling her he had found the ring
‘Then I got this really high-pitched ping. And I thought, This might not be her ring, but this is damn sure somebody’s property. Something that’s valuable.’
‘When I looked down in there, the sun was up and was shining, and the ring was sitting still in some sand, but it was sitting straight up and down. And that center stone was just like a beacon.’
He then wrote to Arias telling her he found the ring and she burst into tears upon receiving the news.
Arias and her fiance then got a couple they knew who were holidaying in Costa Rica to bring the ring back to the U.S.
It was finally returned to her in Fourth Ward, Atlanta, forty days after she lost it.
She explained: ‘I thought I was gonna cry when I got it back, because when I think about it, I keep thinking about when we lost it, and so of course that brings up a lot of emotions.
‘I’m just happy. We approached it with some humor after we got over the initial hump of dealing with the loss, and it had become a funny story to tell about losing it.
‘But now it’s an awesome story because of all the good stuff that’s happened, and all the luck that we have clearly fallen into.’
She tried to send Harris $500 for his trouble but he claimed: ‘I appreciate that, but I don’t sell people’s own property to them.’
Source: Read Full Article