A hobby diver couldn’t believe his luck when he found a £55,000 luxury watch on the seabed using a metal detector.
Giorgio, 38, found the high-end timepiece amid the sea grass at a depth of 10 m (33 ft).
The pricey watch had been lost by a tourist as he 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.
Giorgio found the wristwatch in the sea off Port de sa Pedra de s’Ase in Mallorca, Spain, 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.”
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”.
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.
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.
Giorgio explained: “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.”
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.
Giorgio said: “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.”
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.
His client reportedly screamed with joy when Giorgio – who is Georgian but grew up in Germany – gave him the good news.
The detectorist recalled: “He immediately informed his son, who could hardly believe his luck.”
It was found on Tuesday (2 Jul).
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