Michael Pelley — also known as “Merman Mike” on social media — shared footage of the rescue mission on Youtube, where he often posts videos retrieving people’s lost items underwater.
In the July 10 video, Jennie of Bakersfield, California, explained that she was swimming with her family at Bass Lake when her wedding ring went missing. A friend of Jennie’s mentioned that there were lots of scuba divers who could search for the ring, leading her to discover Pelley. The ring owner, reached out to him on social media, and he agreed to drive three and a half hours from Northern California to help her find it.
In the video’s caption, Pelley said Bass Lake, located near Yosemite National Park, is 45 feet deep and man-made, meaning his search would be “difficult.”
“Almost immediately after I reached the bottom of the lake, I realized how difficult the search was going to be. The silt had immediately clouded out the area and I was in almost zero visibility,” Pelley wrote, adding that he also had to take additional safety precautions this time due to the lake’s depth.
The Ring…
“I kind of started prodding my hand every time I swiped with the metal detector, and I came up with a lot of cans, I came up with a couple of sticks. then I thought it was going to be another bottle top or a can pull tab, I find a lot of those, but I was looking at a diamond. I can’t describe the emotions that went through my head,” said Pelley.
Jennie was ecstatic when Merman Mike came to the surface with her ring in hand.
He takes a lot of safety precautions, so Mike says it took a couple of dives and at least a couple of hours to find Jennie’s ring. He said this search was one of his most challenging because Bass Lake is deep, and the water at the bottom is very cold and murky, ABC 7 News tells us.
