Hobby diver finds lost £55,000 luxury watch on seabed with metal detector

dailyrecord.co.uk:

A hobby diver couldn’t believe his luck when he found a £55,000 luxury watch on the seabed using a metal detector, on a routine dive.Diving in Mallorca, Spain, Giorgio, 38, found the Patek Phillipe designer timepiece hidden in the sea grass at a depth of 10 m (33 ft).The pricey watch was dropped and lost by a tourist who jumped into the sea from a boat in the summer of 2023.His watch strap came loose and the Patek Philippe Aquanaut Travel Time sunk to the seabed but Giorgio found the wristwatch in the sea off Port de sa Pedra de s’Ase in just three attempts.He said: “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.”Devastated by his loss, the Danish watch owner had tasked Giorgio with recovering the family heirloom, which he wanted to pass on to his son.Accomplished diver Giorgio and his girlfriend, Caro, have a hobby business called Mallorca Detecting - “a service that helps others find their lost treasures” which have ended up in the sea.

Recovering the missing watch was no easy feat, as reported on What's The Jam. Giorgio told local media: “At the spot where the Dane lost it, the sea grass was one and a half metres high.”Although he has a top-of-the-range metal detector, it cannot penetrate the dense, tall grass and after an unrewarding first dive, “we put the project on hold for a while,” Giorgio said.But his client still wanted to get the timepiece back, so Giorgio, who is a trained industrial designer by day, decided to make a marking system from plastic bottles underwater.Giorgio explained: “I had a central buoy as a midpoint marker, which I lowered at the GPS position of the last anchor mark.