Five eighth-graders poking around a Kauai reef at dawn fished out a solid-gold US Naval Academy ring that the ocean had swallowed more than 50 years ago – then tracked down the family it belonged to.
The boys – Mateo Morgado, Finn Scarbo, Levi Hovland, Nathaniel Knickel and Cade Ormond – were camping at Camp Naue on June 13 when a King Tide and a big southerly swell left the reef unusually bare.
With the surf flat and the sandstone exposed, the camp caretaker suggested a reef walk. The boys were up at first light.
“This only happens about four, maybe five days out of the year,” Knickel said. “Normally, there is surf pounding the reef.”
In under an hour, they were back with the big gold ring. Hovland, who actually spotted it wedged between rocks, gave the credit to his buddies.
“It’s their fault,” he joked. “I was sleeping, and they woke me up.”
Then came the detective work. The parents squinted at the inscriptions, ran them online and traced the ring to a 1963 Annapolis grad: retired US Navy Capt. Jon Paul Scott, who died in 2011. His obituary led them to his widow, Peggy Scott, 84, in New Hampshire.
Parent Heather Morgado fired off a text. “My hands were shaking,” she said. Less than two minutes later, the reply set the group screaming.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Peggy answered. “This is my husband’s ring.”
The Scotts had been stationed in Hawaii in the 1970s. On a weekend trip to Kauai’s North Shore, they set the ring on a beach towel before wading in, and a wave swept it away. It rode out 50 winters of surf and two hurricanes.
The kids reached the Navy through Kaulana Mossman of the Pacific Missile Range Facility, who had a contact at Annapolis. On June 22, the ring landed in Peggy’s New Hampshire mailbox.
“The ring looked beautiful and amazing after 50 years of rolling around in the surf,” she wrote to the families. Coach Keli‘i Morgado, Mateo’s dad, had a simpler word for it: “This is serendipity.”
