Lost shotgun

[DetectorGuy]

Yesterday a lady called me and told me that she would like me to look for a shotgun that her neighbor lost in her man made pond. I was coming home from work and I was only 10 minutes from her house. I swung in and looked at this pond. It was about 5 acres with cattails around the edges. It was getting dark so I could not check the water clarity. She asked if it would be worth looking for... I told her that I would charge $30.00 to look for it with no guarantees that I would be able to find it. She told me that $30.00 per hour would be fine. I did not expect this rate to be "per hour" but a flat rate. I'm glad that she added the Per hour comment because in hindsight that would have been dirt cheap. I came back to the pond this morning with all my gear. The air temp was in the 30's and the water temp was in the 40's. I left my gloves at first as I wanted to "feel" into the silt but I quickly went back to shore and put them on. Wading through the mud I was very concerned that this gun would not be found. I was really surprised that the visibility was about 20 feet in this spring fed pond. I swam out to the decoy that was being used as a marker for where the boy thought the gun slipped off the duck boat and into the water. I started at the decoy and swam in spiral circles out to a 40 foot radius just above the silty bottom looking for it. (It is extremely hard to maintain neutral buoyancy in 4 feet of water) I then went back to the decoy and used the  Garrett Seahunter U/W metal detector and repeated my search pattern with the head of the detector probing as far as 3 feet into the silty mud. The visibility went to near zero. I had no real solid signals from the detector but alot of faint ones from years of duck hunters lead and steel shot raining down from the sky. I admitted to my self that this area was "clean" and that the shotgun must have been dropped outside of this area. I started to expand the search and Looked for a while but my air was running low after 1 1/2 hours of searching. My other tank was empty and this would be all the searching that would be done today. So I was disappointed not to find this Benelli Super Black Eagle 2 semi-auto shotgun for this kid who had worked for two years at Cabala's just to buy this $1800.00 Gun. So someone in the future will find this gun by accident and wonder what the story was behind it... I had fun diving for it and it would have been great to see this new hunter get reunited with it but... not today. Thanks for taking the time to read this long winded story

[Jolly_mon]

I've never been 'paid' to find anything, but does the stack of quarters I've found mean I've lost my Amateur status?  I need to keep it so when they make underwater metal detecting an Olympics sport I'm ready! 

Here is some of the junk I've found.
<a href="http://s107.photobucket.com/albums/m298/yeti1993/LakeFinds/?action=view&current=DSC_7949A3_small.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m298/yeti1993/LakeFinds/DSC_7949A3_small.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a>

Still a long ways to go to pay off my detector a quarter at a time  ;D

[DetectorGuy]

Thanks for posting the pictures PRM. I would say that your probably right about paying for your gear one quarter at a time. just looking at the pictures it looks like in a year or two you would have found enough dive gear to make a crazy lookin' setup. Kinda like that Johnny Cash song where he puts together that car one piece at a time and it didn't cost him a dime. We will need to compare notes sometime on good spots to look for said treasure.

[DiverQueen]

PRM....Getting paid by the person who lost the item to look for it whether or not you actually find said object is the definition of having lost one's amateur status for the sake of this discussion.     No, I didn't find the ring I was looking for....Too bad I lost a weight belt on that job : GPS=??  It's out there somewhere!

But otherwise, one of my dive buddies found a nice fishing lure.  Another buddy found a mask that looked a lot like that green one in the photo.  I've found a few beverage cans, one of them was even still sealed!  Saving up the aluminum for the Cub Scouts.  Smallest item I've ever found...a sunflower seed hull!  And that was in (Very Low Vis!!) Minnetonka!

[DetectorGuy]

The funny part of me looking for that gun that day was while I was doffing my gear, the kid was asking about the metal detector. He asked if it worked above ground too. I told him that it did. He asked if he could use it for a minute as he had lost an arrow too a week earlier. I said sure. In two minutes he said "Hey I hear something. Could this be it?" I said "Maybe". I dug a small 2" deep hole in the sod and there was the tip of his arrow. I pulled it through and he was smiling from ear to ear. It was a graphite arrow and he lost it while shooting at a target. He said it was one of his $300 per dozen arrows. For a second he forgot about his lost gun.