Newsmaker: Marshfield man pushes lost item recovery 'to the limit' with metal detecting

NAME: Lou Asci

AGE: 60

HOMETOWN: Marshfield

IN THE NEWS: Asci's popularity grew this summer when he received national attention for finding an engagement ring lost at Hampton Beach in New Hampshire.

NOW YOU KNOW: In addition to finding personal belongings, Asci has explored farm fields in Duxbury to find Civil War and Revolutionary War items including pieces of muskets, musket balls, buttons and old heel plates from soldiers.

HIS STORY: If something is lost, then Marshfield native Lou Asci will do everything he can to find it.

Equipped with a metal detector and a digger, Asci has spent the last five years on a mission to recover lost items for people in his hometown and beyond. After receiving the metal detector as a gift from his kids, what started out as a hobby quickly turned into something he loves, Asci said.

Together with his longtime friend Mike Chorzewski, the pair find people online who have reported lost items and want to get them back. Chorzewski serves as the dispatcher for finding and assigning search missions. He browses Facebook looking for lost item posts and then dishes the information to his treasure-hunting friend.

Chorzewski has been metal detecting for about three years and still considers himself a beginner. He said he admires what Asci has been able to accomplish, and how seriously he takes each search.

"He knows the sound, he knows where to look," Chorzewski said. "In the dark he can do it, I know he could."

Asci and Chorzewski met with a Patriot Ledger reporter on a brisk November day at Rexhame Beach in Marshfield, where Asci recalled a time when he helped a woman find an expensive ring at the same beach.

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During the search, he said he had a feeling that no one else was looking in the right place. He saw other people searching in the sand and up on the beach, but the woman said she lost it while she was in the water.

“I was the only guy there that went in the water," he said.

The metal detector Asci uses can be submerged underwater. It sends out a signal from the coil to the ground and, when it hits metal, the signal is sent back up and makes a noise. At low tide, Asci went to the area where the woman said she lost her ring and, after a while, he went out even deeper.

“That’s when I got the hit,” he said. “I looked at it, and the diamonds were flashing back at me in my headlamp.”

By the time he found the ring, it was already dark. He had been working all day.

“It took me over a month to find it,” he said. “I don’t know whether it was to prove it to myself or just to get it back to her, but it was important to me. I have my limits and everything, but I like to push it to the limit, and I didn’t feel like giving up.”

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Asci was the subject of national attention this summer after he recovered a wedding ring that fell into the ocean in Hampton, New Hampshire. He took three separate trips to the beach and found it eight days after its owner posted a plea on Facebook.

“We’ve all been there, we’ve all lost something and it’s a horrible thing,” Asci said. “The anguish that she had, this was something very special to her and I just figured this is something I can do, I can do this.”

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Reach Joel Barnes at jkbarnes@patriotledger.com.

This article originally appeared on The Patriot Ledger: Newsmaker: Marshfield man discovers lost rings, historical artifacts