Two Saturdays ago I went down to Hout Bay beach with the kids and the dog. When I left the house I had on my left pinky my dad's gold signet ring, something he wore for more than 60 years, his father for 40 before that.I am not a jewellery man but on his death in July, my mother showed me my dad's will. Everything went to her apart from one named item to me: the ring. Since the funeral the ring and I had not been parted.When I came home from the beach that Saturday I lit the fire and looked at my left hand. The ring was not there.Desperate to remember when I last saw it, I tried to convince myself it had not been dropped on the beach. Maybe the car? Maybe the porch where I dried off the dog? The house? Search parties, big and small, failed to find a trace.It must have been the beach, somewhere in an area reaching 200m along from where we parked the car. I walked it for hours on the Sunday, noticing how the sand was moving so fast in the wind that anything dropped would have been covered in seconds. That gave me a scintilla of hope.I reach out to friends, and on the Monday a guy called Jed turns up with his metal detector. We spend hours searching. For this, Jed asks nothing. He just likes "the challenge of the hunt". He leaves me with his gear. I spend three afternoons lookings.I reach out further. Google brings me to two metal detecting groups, and a couple of guys offer to help. One, Jason, pitches up on the Wednesday afternoon in a wetsuit and with a detector so strong it can be used in the sea and reach down 30-40cm through the sand. We spend almost three hours looking, the poor man flogging through the water, as the tide is now in across the area where I believe the ring was lost.Two more days pass of my amateur efforts. Fluid dynamics of wet sand being what they are, a heavy gold ring would have plunged way past that in the days since I lost it.I keep going. Too cowardly to have told my widowed mother about the lost ring, I can own up only if I can also say I have done everything humanly possible to find it.A chap called Alan, a keen amateur metal detector, makes contact."I have only one condition," he says. "If I find anything I do not want any reward."It is not until late Sunday afternoon that Alan turns up. He has driven a good hour to get here and has studied the tide tables. I meet him on the beach.It has been eight days since I lost the ring - is this the last throw of the dice?Alan listens closely to my account of where I think I might have lost it. He looks at the beach, he talks about the wind, the tide and the currents and gets to work.Forty minutes later he calls me over to a hole 40cm deep. His eyes, tempered by 20 years of peering into soggy sand, have seen something. "There's your ring, Tim," he says, pointing.My eyes, prickly with tears , cannot pick it up immediately. There it is, dad's ring, his dad's ring, 100 years accompanying the Butcher boys on life's journey .Alan smiles, the kids cavort, the dog joins in and for a moment all is madness. I hug this stranger, this big, bearded stranger.Alan refused all reward. No, he would not accept a fee. No, he did not want petrol money, a celebratory drink nor even fish and chips . No, he would not want flowers for his wife. He wanted nothing more than to give something back.I went down to that beach to find a ring. What I found is that there are still some decent souls out there.Butcher is the author of "Blood River", "Chasing the Devil" and "The Trigger"..