Tom Shay has been searching for treasure his whole life. The Florida resident said it gets him out of the house and is his form of exercise.
After beaches re-opened in Florida following Hurricane Irma, he was on the hunt with his metal detector.
“I call it run and gun. The first three spots, nothing was coming up. No hits on the metal detector,” Shay told CTV News from Redington Beach, Florida.
His search along the coast on the Gulf of Mexico eventually brought him to a fourth location: Sunset Beach on Treasure Island.
Shay’s metal detector finally got a hit, but whatever it was, was buried deep.
“I almost gave up, because normally it would be an aluminum can,” said Shay. “On about the tenth or eleventh try – boom! I look in the net and at first I thought it was a big college ring from a school, you know, in the U.S., but then I looked a little closer.”
It was a championship ring from the Oak Park Raiders football team in Winnipeg. Shay and his girlfriend emailed Oak Park High School’s principal, who then turned to football coach Stu Nixon.
“I just read the text and took a look at the picture. As soon as I saw the picture, I knew exactly what I had. I just burst out in laughter,” Nixon said.
It’s not Nixon’s ring, but he was in Florida when it got lost four years ago.
“We were just chucking the skip ball around in the water, and he threw it and it flew off his finger, and he was like, ‘Oh no!’ so we started looking for it, and couldn’t find it.”
The distance between where the ring was lost, and finally found, is about one kilometre.
For anyone who wears jewelry to the beach, Shay has some advice: “Just don’t wear your jewelry in the water, or somebody like me is going to find it.”
Shay intends on sending the ring back to its rightful owner in Winnipeg.
The owner of the ring did not want to speak publicly.
