Do not move off the spot. The ring is under you, and right now you still know exactly where you were standing. In ten minutes you will not.
Two things are working against you here and they are not the same thing. The wind buries it. The tide moves the whole beach.
On most of the southern beaches the sea goes a very long way out. At Sotavento and Risco del Paso the lagoon fills and empties, so the strip of sand you walked at five in the afternoon is dry and nowhere near the water at nine the next morning. It is not the same beach twice.
So when you post it, do not just name the beach. Give the time, and say whether the water was coming in or going out. That turns a kilometre of sand into a narrow band somebody can actually cover.
The trade wind blows hard here for most of the year. It moves dry sand and it covers things over. What that means is that every day that passes makes the search deeper and slower — not that the ring has gone somewhere else.
Gold is heavy and it settles straight down. It does not roll and it does not travel. That is the reason these searches work more often than people expect. What a metal detector can and cannot find.
Corralejo, the Grandes Playas — kilometres of pale sand with the dune field immediately behind. If you cannot name the stretch, use something on land: the hotel, the car park, the gap you walked down through.
El Cotillo — Los Lagos are shallow pools behind the rock bar, still water, full of families. Searchable, but there is stone and a lot of old scrap metal in there, so it is slow ground. Playa de la Concha is the same thing smaller.
Caleta de Fuste — an enclosed bay, no real force in the water, sand churned all day by people standing in it. If it came off swimming, the circle is short: it is where you could still put your feet down.
Costa Calma, Sotavento and Jandía — board country. A lot of these losses are not water losses at all. They happen on the sand: peeling off a wetsuit, unclipping a harness, packing up.
Morro Jable — a long beach with a promenade. The section in front of the promenade is the part that can genuinely be narrowed down. Beyond it, without a landmark, it is too much ground.
Cool water makes your finger thinner and the ring goes loose. Then you pull at a wetsuit or a sleeve and it flies off — almost always on dry sand, and almost always within a couple of metres of where you were standing. If that is what happened, think about where your things were, not where you swam. It is usually far closer than you think.
The Corralejo dunes are a natural park, and the park starts sooner than it looks: beach sand and dune are the same thing to the eye and two different things in law. Jandía and Cofete are natural park as well. A detector does not go in there.
Beyond that, detector prospecting in the Canaries is regulated as archaeological work and needs an authorisation from the Cabildo. Getting your own property back off a bathing beach is a different thing from that — but the line is real, and knowing where it runs is the job of whoever goes to look.
You do not have to be on the island, and it does not have to be today. The beach, the stretch, the day and the time is enough for somebody to go out and look.
Retrievly does not search. It connects the person who lost something with the people who own detectors.
We are just starting on Fuerteventura. If nobody is signed up near that beach yet, we go and find them in the island's groups and forums and send them your request.
In public only a rough circle is visible. The exact point goes to the one person you choose.
No money goes through Retrievly. A thank-you is arranged directly with the searcher.
The sooner you post it and the tighter the circle, the better. Retrievly vets nobody: meet in daylight, somewhere public.
Post a requestBrowsing needs no account. You only sign in to post.
Kenny built Retrievly. He has snorkelled the Danube for years and keeps bringing up things that belong to other people: wallets with the ID still in them, phones, keys. That is where Retrievly came from.
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