Photo: Dagmara Nall

When Aleki Taumoepeau, a 42-year old ecologist, dropped his wedding ring in the murky waters of a New Zealand just months after he and his wife Rachel got hitched, he was determined to find it at all costs. Everyone — including Rachel — thought he was crazy. Quite miraculously, Aleki found the ring at the bottom of the sea a year and a half later. I got on the phone with Aleki recently to find out how he lost and found his wedding ring in the ocean. It’s a story of love, faith, obsession, and GPS coordinates, and it starts in a beautiful harbor town on the southern tip of New Zealand’s North Island.

I’m a fresh water
ecologist at the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric
Research in Hamilton. My main job is to help the scientists
survey lakes and vegetation, identify species, and advise the
power company and regional councils on how to treat noxious
plants. I usually work in fresh water, but on that day, I was
helping the short-staffed salt water marine guys look for
invasive organisms in Wellington Harbor. There were several
divers with me on board the inflatable Naiad boat, and I was
trying to start the engine when the ring just flew off my
finger.

We all saw it go in the water. I usually
don’t wear my ring when working on boats or diving —
this was just the one time that i forgot to take it off. My
first reaction was to grab an anchor and drop it where the ring
went down. After that, four of the divers on the boat went down
to have a look, but they couldn’t find the ring or the anchor.
The water was particularly murky that day, so after about
thirty minutes I told them not to worry about it. It was Friday
afternoon, and we still had one more job site to attend to.
That was in March 2008, three months after I had married my
wife Rachel.

Three months later, I was at a
conference in Wellington so I decided to go and have a look. I
asked some of the delegates there to help me out —
they thought it was a great cause and were keen to do so. So at
6AM on a cold wintery morning, four of us went out to the
beach. The water was quite rough and cold, about 50 degrees
fahrenheit. I brought Scuba diving gear, a metal detector, and
a dry suit. We were at a sampling site when I lost my ring, so
we had recorded its GPS coordinates on our field sheets. The
area where I’d lost the ring was supposed to be about 100 yards
from the shore and about three meters deep. When I got out in
the water, though, there was so much debris in the area
— pipes, old tire rims, coins, belts — that
the metal detector just went off all the time. I also realized
that I had brought the wrong GPS coordinates with me
— the area where the lost ring was supposed to be a
little bit further away. I was cold and the metal detector was
going crazy, so I headed back to shore. Later that week, I had
another go, but that was also unsuccessful.

Rachel
and I met on a golf course — we just clicked, and
things went very quickly after that. We had a big Tongan island
wedding in November 2007. When I told Rachel about the lost
ring, she said she would buy me another one. But that was too
easy for me. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I insisted that
I was going to find my ring.

Rachel and I returned to
Wellington again this past July to attend another conference. I
said to her, “Let’s go a day earlier to look for the ring!” She
said, “You’re crazy. It’s been 15 months. What are the chances
of finding it?” I promised her it would be the last time I’d
look for it, and that if I didn’t find it she could buy me
another ring. She was happy with that. So off I went to the
beach again with my scuba gear and metal detector. We now have
a baby son, so he and my wife sat on the shore while I went
searching in the water.

This time, I did a little bit
more homework. I managed to get the field sheet from our
original trip with the right GPS coordinates. I mapped them out
on Google Earth — with Google Earth I could actually
see the physical landscape and the trees, which would be useful
for me to relocate the site while swimming. I loaded the
coordinates on my ETrex
and swam out to the site. As soon as I got there, I realized
that the terrain had physically changed. I was a bit concerned
that recent storms could have moved the anchor. And even if the
anchor was still there, the ring may not be next to it.

Regardless, I knew that if I found the anchor, I’d
have a very good chance of finding the ring. I dropped a little
white marker with a plastic bag tied to a rope, put on my
snorkels, and stuck my head under water. The water was so
clear. I had never seen it so clear before. I had a good
feeling that I would find it. I’m Christian, so I said a little
prayer. I said, “God, don’t make it too easy for me because I
was feeling a bit confident that I would find it.” Then I began
swimming around. I figured weeds would have grown over the
anchor, so every clumps of weeds I saw, I’d swim down and have
a look. I covered a lot of ground to no avail. The water was
quite cold, and I was getting tired. I said another prayer:
“God, if the ring is here, it would be nice to show it to me
right about now. I’m tired from bobbing up and down.” I swam
back towards my marker to start over again. I had told myself I
would look for a minimum of three hours. I looked at my watch.
Just over an hour. I stopped and took a deep breath, and
started swimming again…

And there it was! The
anchor was right beneath me. I just couldn’t believe it. There
weren’t even any weeds on it. I was just so excited, and I
thought, wow, I better not lose this spot. I kept looking at
the land to triangulate the spot. My plan was to go back to get
my marker and put it on this spot. Before I went back, though,
I decided to have a quick look — so i went down to the
anchor on the snorkel and circled it. Lo and behold, about
three yards away, was the ring. It was lying flat on the shelly
surface, glimmering in the water. I grabbed it, grabbed the
anchor, and pushed up to the surface. And then I started
cheering. Yeaaaaarhhhh!! Yahoooo!

Rachel heard me
from shore — she was talking on the phone to someone
at work about how crazy I was to be in the water. A couple of
people walking their dogs had asked her what the crazy guy in
the water was doing. When I got back to shore, just Rachel and
the baby were there. I held up the ring. It’s a simple gold
band with four rolls, kind of like four thinner rings connected
together. It was slightly tarnished on the inside, and the gold
was a bit dull, but you could still see it shine.

I
had had this elaborate methodical plan to lay out a search grid
on snorkels, then get my scuba gear and metal detector from
shore and check each square from my marker. But I didn’t even
need that. I just found it on my snorkels. “God, you’re just
awesome,” I thought.

People read a lot of romantic
things into this, but for me it was sort of a challenge. It’s
not the same to buy a new one, you know? In the back of my
mind, I knew I would find it. I have honed my diving skills and
the ability to search for and identify things underwater from
my job — I’m usually looking for plants, but I know
that it’s important to be familiar with the environment, for
example, and to recognize different sediments and substrates at
the bottom. I would have definitely had to use the metal
detector if I’d lost the ring on soft sediment, but here I was
dealing with sandy shell. I later talked to a scientist who
maps sand movements, and he said that that particular area had
a lot of sand movement. It’s possible that the ring was buried
in sand and then unburied again due to water movements and
erosions. That explains why, on my first go at finding the
ring, I only saw logs and murkiness.

I found the ring
on July 29, 2009. After that, the Hamilton Press picked up the
story, and then it took off on a world scale. A lot of people
emailed me saying what a nice story it was. On the Internet,
some people believed in me all along, some people discounted
God, and others thought I had just gone out and bought another
ring and pretended I’d found it. I realized it had impacted a
lot of people. This experience definitely strengthened my
faith. It’s just the power of prayer, I guess.