George Cartselos wakes up every day at 3 o’clock in the morning, eager to pursue his favorite activity: metal detecting.
As he sipped his coffee on the morning of Aug. 5, while the rest of the North Fork was most likely asleep, he saw a message his wife forwarded to him from Maryann Feeney-Nash. Her son, Terrence Nash, had been at Goose Creek Beach in Southold with his family the day before and lost his platinum wedding ring in the shelly, rocky sand.
“I was trying to go swimming with my daughter and took off my ring because my hands were all greasy from sunblock and I didn’t want to lose it in the water,” Mr. Nash recalled in phone interview. “When I came back, I totally forgot I put it in my hat and when I put it on, it must have fell out somewhere in the sand. We tried looking for a couple hours and just no luck.”
Mr. Cartselos is no stranger to receiving messages like this. He said he frequently receives requests to help find missing rings, key fobs, cell phones, cameras and kids Matchbox cars. So, without a second thought, he finished up his coffee and went out to start looking.
He sifted through part of the large beach until sunrise, but his first search attempt of the day was unsuccessful. Returning home, he grabbed a different platinum ring he found years before to test for the metal’s “sound.”
Metal detectors can transmit an electromagnetic field from its electric search coil into the ground and picks up the different tones of these magnetic fields. A high-pitched tone means an object is closer to the surface and it is either made of silver or copper. A lower-pitched sound indicates the target is deeper in the ground, and likely made of a denser metal like gold.
He also said he looks for the Visual Discrimination Indicator — or VDI — numbers to get a better sense of how conductive the metal is. These numbers typically range from 0-99. Lower numbers equal gold, while high VDIs are more likely to be duller metals like silver, copper or aluminum.
Platinum is a heavy metal and denser than gold, which makes it a rare find for metal detectorists.
“There aren’t different grades of platinum, like gold — gold can have copper in it or silver, so you hear different things, you see different numbers,” Mr. Cartselos said. “Platinum is just straight platinum, so the numbers that come up don’t change because there’s no other metals in there and the sound doesn’t change [either].”
After a second cup of coffee, Mr. Cartselos headed back to Goose Creek — this time with an underwater metal detector.
It was cold and the drizzling rain was not ideal for metal detecting — or being in the water, Mr. Cartselos said. He almost threw in the towel and thought about coming back another day, but after an hour, he heard the muffled beeping noise.
“As soon as I heard it, I sort of knew I had it,” Mr. Cartselos said. “It was just really by luck because it could have been anywhere — I saw it in my scoop, now I got it, so I was pretty happy about that.”
As of Friday, Mr. Nash’s wedding band is back on his finger. He said he felt relieved and grateful for Mr. Cartselos’ efforts. Thanks to him, Mr. Nash was able to save himself the hassle and hefty expense of purchasing a new wedding band.
“We just met up at a gas station in town and he was super honest, nice about the whole thing,” Mr. Nash said. “He’s one of the few honest people out there in this community of people that kind of just do this for a living — they follow these posts on the internet, actually look and sell that stuff — he does it kind of just as a hobby.”
Mr. Cartselos said his sister gifted him his first metal detector when he was a child. After raising a family and securing his current day job as a groundskeeper for the Greenport School District, his wife urged him to pick the hobby back up.
He remembered going down to Kenney’s Beach in Southold with the metal detector for the first time and immediately finding $200 in a metal money clip. That moment hooked him, and the intrigue remains 15 years later.
His collection of lost treasures runs the gamut — from shoe boxes full of jewelry to Civil War era musket balls dug up from farm fields. He is currently working with the yearbook club and faculty members of Garden City High School to return a missing class ring of a 1972 graduate.
He belongs to a free online service called The Ring Finders where users can search through a database of metal detectors, contact one within a 25-mile radius of their location and request their help in finding a lost item.
Although he hasn’t received any inquiries through that website yet, he said usually locals message him directly through Facebook. His services are free of charge, but he said some people offer him a reward.
Additionally, he spends time teaching a young, up-in-coming metal detectorist in the community. His single piece of advice for anyone looking to pick up the pastime is to practice and listen to the machine.
“Don’t get discouraged because you’ll pick up a lot of bottle caps — and it’s usually a lot of digging,” Mr. Cartselos said. “It’s a neat hobby — helping friends out is probably the best thing for me.”