Jo-Anne Birch knows the pure rush on adrenaline one receives when making a valuable discovery.

The retired business owner and president of the Penticton Metal Detectors Club was walking her dog along Dog Beach when she spotted a sparkle in the sand. Her heart started racing.

As metal detector club president, Birch was aware that a young man had lost his 14-karat white-gold wedding band incrusted with 30 diamonds at the beach. The RCMP had, as they often do, asked the club if they could assist in the recovery of the band and Birch had sent out two of their members to the beach.

“They had been out at the beach with their detectors for three hours with no success,” said Birch.

So days later, it was quite elating when she pulled the item out of the sand and dusted it off to find 30 bright diamonds shining back at her.

“It was very exciting to find that ring, a real high,” she said. “The young man was just ecstatic. He kept saying, ‘No way, no way.’

“It is just wonderful to be able to help someone.”

Helping people seems to be a major function of the approximately 28-member club.

The club is often recruited by the RCMP to help find lost items, such as the wedding band, but most of the time, club members find peoples lost valuables without being asked to look. And when that happens, finding the item sometimes becomes just the first part of the search, as club members use their detective skills to try and track down who the item belongs to.

“We always try to find the owner of every item we find,” said Birch. “School rings are good ones because they usually have the date and the name of the school on them so we can track the owner down that way.”

Birch said that the club also posts finds on its website, with the most recent “Find-of-the-Month” page featuring: the wedding ring, an 1887 English penny, 1925 U.S. mercury dime, an old throwing knife and an antique hose nozzle.

Beyond finding other people’s treasures, club members also clean up other people’s junk, with two of its members cleaning up beaches in the area.

And every year, the club hosts a charity hunt — this year raising $3,250 for the CT scanner campaign at Penticton Regional Hospital — with over 60 hunters coming from all over Washington, Idaho, Alberta and B.C. to participate at Sudbery Beach.

Hunts consist of scattering coins, prize tokens and other items throughout an area and then letting the hunters look for them. This year the top prize in the Penticton hunt was a trip for two to anywhere WestJet Airlines flies.

The Penticton Metal Detectors Club meets on the third Tuesday of every month. For more information about the club visit the website www.pmdc.ca.

city@pentictonwesternnews.com