Wedding ring lost in the Atlantic returned to Mississauga couple
Michael Sonsogno was fishing off the coast of Florida in January when his wedding ring slipped off his finger.
Three months later, he would get the ring resized. What happened in between then is quite a story.
"I hear this knock on the floor and I look down and I'm watching my ring roll across the pier and down through a crack," says the Mississauga, Ont., man. "I watched it fall down. I know where it is and if it wasn't for all the sharks, fish and everything down there, I would have jumped in after it."
He spent $600 sending divers into the ocean to look for the prized, 24-karat, two-tone wedding ring he had been married in four years earlier. He left his number with pier management in case it washed up somehow.
The ring was lost to the Atlantic Ocean, he thought. So he phoned Marianna Sonsogno, his wife, to deliver the bad news. "I was crying like a baby," he remembers of the call.
Months passed, and Sonsognos lost hope.
But this week, he got a call from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Lou Nelson, a diver in the area for the past 30 years, was volunteering as a part of the SOS Ocean Clean Up, an Earth Day event to clean up debris from the ocean floor.
"I looked down and I saw something that looked like a key ring — about the size of a nickel," he said. "I reached down and picked it up."
He found the lost wedding ring.
When event organizer Lisa Miceli-Capano asked the group of nearly 120 volunteer divers who had found the most interesting item, Nelson mentioned he found what looked like a wedding ring.
Since Sonsogno had been in conversation with the Anglins Pier management and left his number with them, pier staff made the connection.
Miceli-Capano phoned him to check. Sonsogno quickly sent her a photo of the ring. After spending months in the ocean, the ring was now a different colour. But it was unmistakably the same ring.
"He's like, 'they found it, they have it.' And I'm like, 'What?!'"
"He's like, 'They have it, they found the ring!' And I'm like, 'I couldn't believe it!' That was the last thing that I'd ever expected," said Marianna.
Miceli-Capano is shipping the ring to Mississauga. "It's such a beautiful story," she said. "This was the perfect end to a pier cleanup on Earth Day."
The Sonsognos couldn't agree more. They are overjoyed the ring is back on Michael's finger.
"I'm going back to my jeweller to get it all resized and make sure that it's not coming off again," he said.
