LEIGH FINDS HER SPARKLE
LEIGH Daniels was devastated when she lost her engagement ring at Bob Pettit Reserve in Jan Juc on November 11 last year.
Multiple searches, including with a metal detector, were fruitless.
“I had given up all hope that it was ever going to be found again,” Mrs Daniels said.
The Armstrong Creek 32-year-old had placed the ring in her pocket alongside her keys and wedding ring while applying sunscreen to her son and stepkids.
She believes it may have become hooked on the keys, and was lost when she pulled them from her pocket on the way to the car.
But her tears became happy ones on Sunday after kind strangers and the power of social media reunited her with the lost ring.
Twelve-year-old Nina Delnenico, of Anglesea, was playing at the reserve when she saw the ring “glistening in the dirt and just picked it up”, Mrs Daniels said.
“It wasn’t far . . . from the BMX track, where we thought we’d lost it,” she said.
Nina passed the ring on to her friend’s mother, Jan Juc local Victoria Meakin.
Mrs Meakin took it to the police station but it was not manned, so she turned to social media for help.
When the ring was first lost, Mrs Daniels wrote a Facebook post that was shared hundreds of times. Her sister-in-law had shared it to a Surf Coast Community Noticeboard Facebook page, and when Mrs Meakin had the ring, she found the post and messaged Mrs Daniels’s sister-in-law.
“My sister-in-law rang me . . . she said they’d found my ring and . . . my reaction was probably a bit over the top, but I was out the front crying and carrying on,” she said.
“My husband came running out, he thought I had been attacked or something.”
She was reunited with her jewellery on Monday.
“(Victoria) rocked up and gave me a huge hug and I started crying again . . . and then she got emotional,” Mrs Daniels said.
“I can’t believe how well it’s held up considering it’s been sitting out in the weather for 3½ months.
“I’m super grateful, not only that Nina found it, but that it fell in the right hands with Victoria, and that she’d gone to the effort of searching for me and looking for me.”