Evan’s find has the ring of a miracle
A SCUBA diver has been reunited with his wedding ring more than a month after it slipped off his finger into the depths at Norman Reef.
Mark Meres and his wife Chiquita were visiting from Batemans Bay in New South Wales when they took a dive with Deep Sea Divers Den instructor Evan Guiton on April 10.
It was a reunion for the trio who met while diving with humpback whales off the coast of Tonga last year. Everything was going swimmingly. Then disaster struck.
“I was on the boat when they came back from the dive and he told me he had lost his wedding ring,” Ms Guiton said.
“A lot of people jumped back in and tried to find it but everyone kind of knew it was gone – if you drop a ring in the coral, it’s gone for good.”
Ms Guiton, a 25-year-old Canadian on a working holiday visa, had returned to the dive site “a million times” since Mr Guiton’s loss but somehow stumbled across the ring on Wednesday.
“It was covered in green algae and didn’t even look like a ring, but I pick up anything that doesn’t look like reef,” she said.
“It just hit me that this was the dive site where he lost it. I looked at the ‘soulmates’ inscription on the inside and it was his ring.
“What are the odds, especially that I would be the one to find it?”
In another statistical anomaly, today marks 10 years to the day since Mark and Chiquita started dating.
Mr Meres was thrilled to be out of the doghouse.
“I can’t believe it. I never thought I would see it again,” he said.
“We are both passionate divers and I have dived all over the world and have never taken the ring off or lost it.
“The ocean gives back.”