Barnacled Gold ring

Tom,

We all know that gold doesn't tarnish but........ Remember Mike Brown, the tall skinny guy that won the big prize at the beach shootout, well he just made a ring find that we were able to locate the owner and return. The ring is 18K with value around $700 and is heavily encrusted with barnacles. It was lost about 40 years ago out in the beach waters near Clearwater. Story and photo will be in next issue of the Suncoast Treasured Times. You should get your issue around July 20th. The man who had the ring died about 10 years ago and his widow was elated with the return.

Suncoast Wally

I didn't know barnacles could do that to even gold.

Story's like that keep a great light on the rest of us detectorists...

Great result and thanks for letting us knnow!

Fascinating! I would keep it encrusted......just for show-n-tell purposes. If you MUST clean it off.........lime-away or pool cleaning acid (muratic/hydrochloric/stomach acid) will do the trick. The gold ring ........ especially higher karat..... will not accrue damage from acid. If it has a stone in it.... do NOT drop it in acid. It'll eat the stone..... IN SHORT ORDER!

Nice 'significant' find!

I don't know what barnacles will do to gold, but I know from experience that barnacles will eat holes through 316 stainless steele. Where I work we have water depth sense lines in the Indian River that are stainless steele and they must be replaced every 10 months or so because barnacles eat holes through the sense lines. I would have NEVER believed this had I not seen it myself. We now use marine anti-fouling bottom paint (which is high in copper content) and so far the sense lines have lasted over a year.

They plate the bottom of ships with copper to prevent barnacles and zebra mussels which is a big problem now up here in the Great Lakes.

Hey all,
The ring is from the Naval Academy and was quite large. One of the guys involved in the recovery is a jeweler and was going to clean it but the widow wanted us to send it back as we found it. I found out today the ring was 14K and not 18K. Perhaps that allowed the barnacles to grab on??? It's the first gold that I have heard of that had barnacles on it. The vast majority of our hunting here is in the salt water and salty beaches and over a course of the years I know that our club has found hundreds of gold jewelry and none has been blemished! Beats me.

Suncoast Wally

If it's 14Kt yellow gold......that's a copper alloy. If it's white gold......it's most probably a nickel alloy.