Persistence helps New Zealand diver find lost wedding ring

His friends have taken to calling him "Lord of the Ring" after Aleki Taumoepeau plucked his wedding ring from the bottom of Wellington Harbour 16 months after he lost it. The Niwa ecologist, from Hamilton, never gave up hope that he would find the ring after it slipped from his finger while he was checking the harbour for invasive plant species in March last year. At the time he hastily threw an old anchor overboard to mark the spot and vowed to wife Rachel that he would find it refusing her offers to buy a replacement.

"It flew off into the air and everyone on the boat was looking at it and said it was like a scene from Lord of the Rings in slow motion," Mrs Taumoepeau said. The couple had been married for just over three months. "She kept saying to me when we went out, `I'll have to buy you a new ring,' but I just said, 'No, I'll find it,"' he said.

Back in the capital for a conference three months after the mishap, he decided to borrow dive gear from colleagues to search. Conditions were bad and the GPS co-ordinates he had noted down at the time were wrong, so he came away empty-handed.



A year later, Mr Taumoepeau was back, with some new co-ordinates garnered from Niwa and website Google Earth. This time his wife and their nine-month-old son, Alekisanita, watched from the Petone shore. "I thought he was mad going back a year after," she said. "Even people on the beach were saying 'Is he OK? Is he a bit crazy?"'

In three metres of water near the Hutt River mouth, Mr Taumoepeau hunted for the anchor. After an hour, he stopped to catch his breath and, while doing so, asked for some divine intervention. "I was getting cold and tired so I said to God it would be really good to find the ring about now."

He then looked down, spied the anchor and just centimetres away from it the ring. "I couldn't believe that I could see the ring so perfectly. I was thinking I won't see all of the ring, maybe part of it, but the whole top surface of the ring was glowing," he said. His wife heard him cheering and screaming in the water. "I couldn't believe it. It was the power of prayer."

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