12/21/20 Report - Over 600 Items Found and Returned by One Group But Many Happy Returns Unreported. One Bad Apple.

 Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.

Happy  Couple With Returned Ring.
Source: Shore News Network - See link below.

Detectorist Group Donates Their Time to Find and Return Cherished Lost Items.

... Suncoast Research and Recovery Club, a member of an international group called The Ring Finders, is made up of about 100 people from the Tampa Bay area who volunteer their services to people such as the Borawskis. In the last nine years, they’ve used metal detectors to return 607 items to their owners, mostly rings.

Here is how one such find began.

Police here said the couple sent an email to the Clearwater Police Department asking if anyone turned in their ring.  Nobody had.  Imke and Tobias Borawski were crushed when Tobias lost his wedding ring on their visit. They didn’t think they would ever see it again.

The department didn’t dismiss the email as could have so easily been done.  Instead, the email was forwarded to officers who work the beach in case it was turned in. The ring wasn’t found that weekend, but on the following Monday, Police Service Technician Val Hornbeck mentioned a local group of metal detector enthusiasts that works to reunite people with their lost jewelry and other possessions.

Above you see how it ended.

Here is the link for more about that.

Ring Finders find couple’s lost wedding ring on Clearwater Beach lost on Thanskgiving – Shore News Network

Thanks to JamminJack for that lead.

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Officials Seize 27,400 Artifacts Looted by a Single French Treasure Hunter.

... In the statement, officials say Patrice accumulated the artifacts by personally looting sites across France. He then took advantage of differing regulations in France and Belgium to avoid yielding his ill-gotten goods to the state.

The 2019 discovery was far from the first time Patrice had unearthed rare treasures. In 1993, according to Het Nieuwsblad, he dug up 5,250 coins from the third and fourth century A.D., then claimed to have “found” them by a road in Pierreville. The French commune’s mayor allowed him to keep the coins...

French authorities have recovered a trove of more than 27,400 looted objects... which included Bronze Age jewelry, statue fragments and Roman coins for personal use and trading purposes, reports Agence France Presse.

Last fall, Patrice—a Frenchman living in Belgium—told investigators that he’d used a metal detector to unearth 14,154 Roman coins at his recently purchased apple orchard in Gingelom, about 40 miles east of Brussels. But his claims raised suspicions, and officials at the Belgian Agency for Immovable Heritage decided to coordinate with French customs officers to inspect the find...

Here is the link for the rest of the article.

Officials Seize 27,400 Artifacts Looted by a Single French Treasure Hunter | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine

Thanks to SuperRick for that link.

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So there you go.  Some donate their time to find and return cherished items for people they never met  while others break laws and ruin it for us all.

Remember, you are always representing the detecting community, whether you know it or not.  Do it right!

I never kept track of how many items I found and returned to happy owners, and I know most of you have done the same.  I've posted many examples in this blog, but there are many many more that I never heard about.

 I'm sure most of you have been searching a beach when a person asks you if you can find something they just lost.  Sometimes you find it quickly, but sometimes you spend hours looking without any luck.  Sometimes you find the item and hand it to the owner minutes after it was lost, but in other cases you have no idea who lost the item and it takes you years of research before you are able to find the owner.  I've reported on some cases when an item was found many years after it was originally lost, and then it took a lot of time after that before the owner or descendants of the owner were located.  

Thanks to The Ring Finders and all the rest of you who do good deeds, whether they are reported or not. 

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No changes in beach conditions.

It does look like we'll get some more north winds on Tuesday.

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Happy hunting,

TreasureGuide@comcast.net