Diver and metal detectorist Alison Walker has been using her hawk eyes and detecting expertise to locate rings and other heirlooms for nearly 15 years, often accepting donations to a breast cancer charity instead of a reward.
Walker is a longtime supporter of the Kelly Shires Breast Cancer Foundation, which offers financial assistance to Canadians with breast cancer. She was at a fundraising golf tournament for the organization when she bid on a beginner-model metal detector and won. After using it in an event for International Metal Detecting Day, she was obsessed. A few years later, she joined TheRingFinders.com, a global directory of metal detectorists, and started donating her reward money to the Kelly Shires Foundation.
“I’ve raised probably $24,000 in my fifteen years [with Kelly Shires], and probably $15,000 of the 24 is all my reward money,” Walker said. “I charge to go out. When I find the item, I ask the client to make a donation, and they receive a tax receipt.”
At first, Walker didn’t ask for anything when she would go out and seek lost items. She quickly found that calls were bringing her all over the province, and after a few unpleasant interactions, she started writing contracts with clients to nail down travel fees and donations.
With all the driving and time dedicated to the searches, she figured it would be a creative way to generate support for the charity. She won the Kelly Shires Award, which honours volunteers for their innovative fundraising methods, four years ago for her detecting efforts.
Two years ago, she reached a personal fundraising best of $8,320, and she’s still looking to beat it. As a survivor of a rare cancer herself, she knows how difficult it can be to face that sort of diagnosis, so to support a cancer charity while doing something she loves is a win-win.
“To me, detecting was a saviour,” she said. “It took me away from all my troubles.”
Along with being a metal detectorist, she’s also a scuba detectorist and a hookah diver. She’s open water certified to 60 feet, and along with her scuba gear, she uses a floating battery-operated hookah system to pump air down to her as she searches. She owns several different hookah systems, and her diving equipment is just some of the gear she’s amassed.
She’s come a long way from her original beginner-model detector. Now, she has a selection of options. All of her machines are waterproof, ranging from those rated for 10 feet of depth to others that can go 200 feet.
“I have different machines for different scenarios,” she said. “All of them can be used on land. Some of them you can’t use in the cold.”
From beaches to blizzards
Her searches bring her from the bottom of lakes and ponds to the middle of blizzards and beaches. She’s completed 113 recoveries of phones, keys, jewellery pieces and other items, but the vast majority of her searches are rings lost underwater.
Especially in Muskoka, the silt in the water means people struggle to find anything, so many items end up between six and 25 feet under the water, Walker said. Most successful searches happen soon after the item is lost, but she does take on some items that have been missing for years or even decades.
Walker is in the midst of an ongoing search for a ring that was lost in 1966. She’ll continue looking in the fall when the fields dry up, using a grid search to track her progress in an area about the size of two football fields. In another long-term loss, she recently found an 18-karat white gold English wedding band that her client misplaced more than a decade before.
“That was sixteen years in a really gross pond, Professor’s Lake in Brampton. It’s disgusting,” she said. “Very rarely do I get a clear vis or good visibility in any of these lakes in Ontario.”
She’s going back to Hamilton Harbour for the seventh time soon in hopes of locating the 25th anniversary ring of a rower, which has been lost for over a year. A photo of one of her fellow rowers has GPS markers, so Walker will use an underwater circular grid to hopefully locate the ring.
Sometimes she finds them even without her equipment. She spotted one ring on the roadway in Bracebridge this winter within moments of pulling up. She found a Cartier ring almost immediately while bringing her gear into a Toronto backyard. In Bala, she searched in the water for two and a half hours before noticing the ring under a table when she went to change tanks.
No matter how simple a search is, she loves reuniting people with their lost relics, and she even picks up all the litter she finds along the way.
“Every ring has a story,” she said. “I love meeting the different types of people.”
She’s preparing for another ring search in Lake Manitouwaba in Seguin for early July. She’s put the message out to neighbours on the lake in case anyone else has items to look for. It allows her to split up the travel fee and hopefully raise more donations for Kelly Shires.
Searching for rings and saving marriages
Walker charges based on mileage, and the calls truly have taken her all over Ontario. For some people, the travel fee and donation exceed the value of the item lost, but for others, the sentimental value of the item wins over. If she’s unable to help, she gives tips to people on how they can try to locate their items, but there’s only so much she can do from afar.
“Over 50 people went and bought or rented a machine and couldn’t find their lost item because they don’t know how to use it,” she said, adding that two people were successful. “There’s a certain expertise to it, and I still always learn when I go out.”
She went to Lake Muskoka this past weekend to find a 300-pound sailboat keel that the owner lost last year. She found it in 15 minutes, and while rigging up and removing the keel, she learned a lot about sailboats and removing large items from the water.
She’s done dozens of successful searches in the Greater Toronto area, Muskoka and other parts of Ontario, and she’s even gone as far as Thunder Bay. She drove 16 hours, got permission to search near the Sleeping Giant, and found the Italian engagement ring that belonged to the woman’s late grandmother in just 40 minutes.
“I made her cry, which I love making them cry,” Walker said. “I know how much some of these items mean, the sentimental value attached to them.”
Walker recently started giving clients the option to make a donation or give a smaller amount directly to her. She usually asks that they donate 20 per cent of the value of whatever the item is, but it depends on the situation. She always comes to an agreement with her clients, and though she often gives people a break, many people bring her to tears with the generosity of their donations.
She regularly finds other items while searching for people’s jewellery, so she currently has several rings that she’s looking to reunite with their original owners. One is a men’s wedding band with a wedding date and a nickname found in Tobermory, while another is a Birks Canada wedding set found in the Florida Keys.
She doesn’t like the idea of selling them, giving them away or melting them down, so she hangs on to them in the hope that the owners see her posts and reach out. She plans to continue detecting for as long as possible, but after turning 60 this January, she will likely stick to the waters and snowbanks of Ontario.
“I’m hooked,” she said. “If I could get a winter job on a salvage boat down in the Florida Keys…I would love to do that, but I’m a senior now.”
Whether it’s a $10,000 ring abandoned during a fight or a simple pair of sunglasses swept away in the water, Walker adores having the chance to reunite people with their wayward keepsakes.
“I love helping people and seeing that smile back on their faces, especially newly engaged couples,” she said. “I think I’ve saved a few marriages.”
An angel on Earth
For Laura Desiato, it wasn’t a marriage that she saved but rather a precious family heirloom. Desiato was in Huntsville for Canada Day Weekend last year when her family took the boat to Boston Pizza for lunch. While she was fidgeting, her grandmother’s 25th-anniversary ring fell off her finger and went through the slats of the dock.
“I could still see it, but I couldn’t really grab it,” she said. “My cousin kind of went to put a fork in between the panelling to grab it, but when she did that, it actually fell into the water.”
They went to management to see about getting under the docks, but the staff said it was impossible. While she was busy being distraught, Desiato’s friend went to Facebook to see if anyone could help, and that’s when Walker entered the picture.
She introduced Desiato to The Ring Finders and offered her assistance. A few days later, Walker was in the water at the Huntsville docks while Desiato was working from home, anxiously awaiting news about the ring.
“I was just so nervous because of how the dock is set up and how she’d have to go underneath,” Desiato said. “It was probably the most challenging rescue she’d ever had to do, so I really wasn’t expecting her to turn up with the ring.”
When Desiato’s phone rang, Walker said she had bad news: it was time to pay up and make her donation since she had found the ring. Desiato went from devastated to delighted in an instant.
“It was just like a complete 180. I was over the moon,” she said. “I still am. I look at the ring all the time and I’m just like so thankful, so grateful.”
She was also glad to learn that she wasn’t alone when it came to losing such a precious item. Seeing all the other people who had used The Ring Finders was refreshing, and now she knows where to direct people with lost rings and other items in the future.
After losing her grandmother to cancer, Desiato didn’t mind making the donation one bit. It was rewarding to see Walker do a service for others in support of such a great cause, she said, so the experience ended up being a sweet one for her. She still keeps in touch with Walker from time to time, and she credits her both for her skill and for having the largest heart of anyone she’s met.
“I would just really like to stress how great of a person Alison is,” Desiato said. “She is really like an angel on Earth.”
For more information, visit Alison Walker’s profile on TheRingFinders.com.