When Heather Tate first discovered the diamond ring floating in the Gulf of Mexico, she thought it was a prank.
She was paddle boarding out past the second sandbar Sunday afternoon when she noticed what she thought was a piece of trash in the water. She retrieved it to find a diamond ring in a jeweler’s box sealed in a Ziploc bag.
“I thought, ‘Am I being punked right now?’ ” she remembers thinking. “It was so bizarre. It felt like something out of a movie; very surreal.”
Tate, who lives in Miramar Beach, has spent the last few days searching for clues about the ring owner’s identity.
Through Facebook she found a clerk at a local grocery store who sold a cake to a man who told her about losing a ring on his girlfriend’s birthday.
She has traced the ring back to a local jewelry store and is working with employees to try to find the purchase record.
Tate says she can’t stop imagining some poor guy out on a kayak or personal watercraft planning to propose, only to reach into his pocket and find he’s lost the ring.
“I’m a hopeless romantic,” she says. “I just can’t get this couple out of my head.
