Losing things, misplacing them, is a bummer--what is worse? Losing something REALLY special--like your brand-new wedding ring!!
It’s what happened to a Houston couple after their wedding in Austin last month. Nathalie and Jesse White were high-school sweethearts--and they got married back on September 9th, their 10 year anniversary.
The day after the celebration, the Whites decided to have a party on Lake Travis with visiting family and friends. People had come into town for the wedding--many escaping hurricane damage...so they decided the party on the lake would be a great treat. And then...Nathalie went down the water slide on the party boat--and came up from the water, and thought: There is supposed to be a ring on my hand! There was no ring...
Nathalie and Jesse looked underwater, but found nothing, and thought her ring was gone for good.
Nearly one month later to the date, on Sunday, Oct. 8, Texas Department of Public Safety officer Aaron Grigsby spent his Sunday off-duty diving with Lake Travis Scuba.
“This is just a fun thing for me to do on the weekends,” Grigsby said. “It was the last dive of the day on Sunday. The party barges had been there all week and everybody knows, all the divers know the party barges have a lot of things that are lost off of them — iPhones, wallets, jewelry you name it.”
It was then, he noticed something gleaming in the distance.
“As I was coming up from the depth, there was a ring sitting on a rock ledge about 25 feet, real close to some of the rock shelves where everybody loves to jump off the rocks,” Grigsby said.
It was a 14 karat white gold wedding band with initials engraved on the inside, “N&J 9-9-2017.” Grigsby went home and started googling combinations of Austin weddings on Sept. 9, trying to see if he could find a website, social media posts or registry announcement.
“I was hitting a little bit of a brick wall once you start entering in names it becomes a bit easier,” Grigsby said. “So we actually just took a wild stab at what we thought the ‘N’ name would be if it were a female and we came up with Natalie. We typed in Natalie it was the very first possible name combination and it went right to their website on the knot.com.”
Grigsby found the Whites’ phone number on the site and called to deliver the good news.
“We called the phone number and she was ecstatic. She immediately knew once I said I was a scuba diver and I found a ring she instantly started yelling at her family that we found it,” Grigsby said.
The Whites say they plan on coming to Austin to meet and thank the team who found it.
So far this year, Lake Travis Scuba divers have found and collected nearly $100,000 worth of lost items, including jewelry and 31 cell phones...
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