Diving team helps couple find wedding ring missing for 25 years in area lake

By Peyton Furtado

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    LAKE HARTWELL, South Carolina (WYFF) — A Lake Hartwell diving team helped a happy couple, reuniting them with a wedding ring that was lost for 25 years. The rescue and the relationship were rocky roads with a happy ending.

It’s a love that came full circle.

“I think we had something that other couples didn’t necessarily have,” David Allen said.

David and Lisa Allen were college sweethearts who married years ago. But when David fell into alcoholism, that all changed.

“What really made the difference for me was she filed for divorce, and that was like somebody pulled the rug out from under my life, you know, my wife and my three kids,” said David.

He started his journey to sobriety as the divorce was finalized, losing weight in the process. As he sat on his brother’s dock in 1998, his ring came off.

“It bounced off the dock and fell in the water,” he remembered.

Twenty-five years later, the two love birds reconnected over a song.

“And we just start dancing,” Lisa said. “And I just saw a different person at that moment.”

The pair was back together, but Lisa’s ring lacked its partner. That’s when the Lake Hartwell Divers got involved. They’ve helped reunite owners and their missing belongings for years.

This time, they searched for four days.

“Every single day you dig up a bolt, or you dig up a pop top or something like that,” said Jeremy Robinson, the Lake Hartwell Divers’ owner. “But once you start finding pull tops from the ’70s and you’re looking for something from the ’90s, you know it’s possible,” he said.

The divers banded together to find the lost wedding band. Finally Friday, Robinson came up, ring-finger first.

“It means so much to him and his family,” he said. “So, it meant a lot to us to help him get it back.”

The happy couple was reunited, their commitment coming full circle.

“I look at it as a baptism,” David said. “The ring went in one way, and then it’s washed and it’s clean and it comes out and it’s something different.”‘

The two say the 25-year journey was all worth it.

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