There's a lot to discover in the depths of the ocean, but one when he found what he set out for buried among the seagrass 10 metres below the surface. Giorgio, 38, who to find lost treasure, was enlisted by a rattled tourist who lost a luxury watch while holidaying in Europe last year. He'd jumped from a boat into the water while visiting Mallorca, Spain, but when he resurfaced, the AUD$110k wristwatch was nowhere to be found.
The Danish watch owner had tasked Giorgio with recovering the family heirloom, which he wanted to pass on to his son. Giorgio and his girlfriend, Caro, have a hobby business called Mallorca Detecting, "a service that helps others find their lost treasures". But recovering the missing watch was no easy feat, he recently detailed.
"At the spot where the Dane lost it, the sea grass was one and a half metres high," Giorgio said. Giorgio eventually found the wristwatch in the sea off Port de sa Pedra de s’Ase in Mallorca, Spain, in just three attempts. "I was underwater for almost nine hours in total and ended up using a marking system I developed specifically for this complicated case to search for the watch," he explained.
Although he has a top-of-the-range metal detector, it cannot penetrate the dense, tall grass. After a discouraging first dive, "we put the project on hold for a while," Giorgio said. But his client persisted, so Giorgio, who is a trained industrial designer, decided to make a marking system from plastic bottles.
The idea came to him on his second dive and he used it on his third dive. "I had a central buoy as a midpoint marker, which I lowered at the GPS position of the last anchor mark. Additionally, I dropped 24 other markers into the water," he explained.
His system featured 2-l plastic bottles filled with sand, attached to 0.5-l plastic bottles with 1.5-m-long pieces of string.
"The small bottles were numbered from one to 24 and floated held by the string, with the large ones with sand at the bottom. This way, I created a grid and then searched the area with the detector," he said. His metal detector went off three or four times due to cans and small pieces of metal.
But it finally sensed the watch, which was covered in coral and slightly rusty but, remarkably, still working. "He immediately informed his son, who could hardly believe his luck," he said..
