Ring Found In Ocean: New Jersey Man Jay Bradford Wedding Ring Recovered From Ocean Floor

When a New Jersey man lost his wedding ring in the ocean, he was determined to get it back, even if the odds were as good as finding a needle in a haystack.

Jay Bradford, of Point Pleasant, is good friends with Capt. Nick Barsa, owner of the charter boat Lock-N-Load. When Bradford, 27, isn’t working on tug boats, he helps his friend out on his charters, cutting bait, filleting fish, untangling fishing lines, and dropping anchors, according to The Ashury Park Press. On Friday, December 12, Barsa had a charter out looking for blackfish, a species of fish that lives within the rock crevices on the ocean floor. Because the fish were refusing to bite on that particular day, Barsa had Bradford pull up the anchor several times so they could move to different locations. As the end of the day neared, Bradford went up to the bow to pull in the anchor, something he had done many times prior that day. However, this time was different. As he was retrieving the anchor, he hit his hand, and his wedding ring fell into the ocean.

“My hand hit the bow rail and the ring came up off my knuckle. The ring slid off, hit the tow rail and went into the water,” Bradford said.

As Bradford watched his ring sink deeper and deeper into the water, his stomach was sinking as well. Obviously upset, he decided to text his wife and tell her what had happened.

“He texted me and said his day was going wrong. I said ‘don’t worry you will find the fish,'” Bradford’s wife Meagan Bradford, 29, said. “He texted me back, ‘it’s not the fishing, I lost my ring in the water.’ I nearly threw up.”

His wedding ring fell to the bottom of the ocean while fishing. A diver somehow found it in 10 minutes: https://t.co/lu4L5TOWoA

— JoshCornfield (@JoshCornfield) December 25, 2015

Meagan explained that she had had his ring made of tungsten because the jewelers told her it wouldn’t scratch. She said, “I wasn’t worried about the cost of the ring I was more concerned with what it meant and what it symbolized.”

Realizing his friend was distraught, Barsa called up Mark Thompson, who owns Dive and Salvage in Sea Bright, to see if there was any chance he could locate the ring, knowing it was a long-shot. Luckilu, Barsa had saved their location on the Global Positioning System so he could pinpoint exactly where Bradford lost the ring.

“People thought I was crazy to try and go back for it. The odds are against finding it. It’s a big ocean out there,” said Barsa.

Thompson is a full-time salvage diver, and has helped people find their belongings in the ocean before. Shockingly, it took him only 10 minutes to locate the ring for Bradford. Although there was hardly any visibility on the ocean floor, using his unique method of tossing metal wash bands into the water to make a trail, Thompson was able to find the small piece of jewelry, finally uniting it with its owner.

“I went down and swam in a radius. I followed my popcorn trail and recovered the metal washers and then I saw the ring was resting on a rock,” said Thompson.

“When they found it I was ecstatic, I was amazed. I couldn’t be more thankful to [Barsa and Thompson] who went out of their way to do this for me. I nicknamed Nick ‘Capt. St. Nicholas,’ for this time of year because these two did perform a Christmas miracle for us to have that ring back,” said Meagan Bradford.

[Photo via Shutterstock]