For Lucas Berube, the satisfaction that comes from metal detecting is one part finding lost treasures and one part returning them.
“Any time you can return something to somebody, it’s a good feeling,” said Berube, an Orleans resident who volunteers with the Cape Cod Metal Detectors.
The group has been helping area residents and visitors to retrieve lost items from ponds and beaches for decades — and doesn’t charge for the service. Last month, its founder Eleanor Hube answered a call from Geoffrey Day of Newburyport, who lost his wedding band while swimming in Scargo Lake in Dennis.
Day, a fisheries biologist who had been looking for herring in the lake, had just exited the water and was sitting on the beach while Lori Day was fly fishing nearby, when he realized that the ring was no longer on his finger.
The loss of the ring hit the couple particularly hard because of its sentimental value — it was made on Cape Cod, inscribed with both their initials and the date of their wedding, and was molded in the shape of Day’s father’s wedding band.
But a few days later, Day, who’d spent childhood summers vacationing on the Cape, remembered something.
Day realized that with a little online searching, he could probably find someone who could help them retrieve the ring. A Google search led him to Hube, who owns the metal detector shop J & E Enterprises in South Yarmouth and has been helping people to find lost things for 46 years.
Eager to help, but worried that the ring might be in water too deep for her to retrieve, Hube called Berube, who dove right in to solve the problem.
Berube specializes in searching water that’s more than just a few feet deep. During a recent patch of stormy weather, he found two rings that had been lost off of Red River Beach in Harwich while searching in chest-deep water as waves crashed over his head, he said.
In his spare time, Berube often relaxes by searching Cape lakes and coastal waters with a metal detector and scuba gear.
But Berube didn’t need his scuba skills to locate Day’s ring. After two afternoons of diving, Berube found the missing band in about 2 feet of water, near a herring run at the lake’s northern end.
“It must’ve come off his finger when he was coming back down shore,” Berube said.
As soon as he pulled the ring from the water, Berube called Day to deliver the news.