Yesterday I found and retrieved a piece of jewelry from the bottom of the pool. This is my ninth piece (mostly earrings) for the year, a new PR. They have all been cheap/fashion pieces except for one, which was a tiny antique silver pendant with a diamond chip in it. Why you'd wear jewelry into a pool is a mystery to me, but it takes all kinds.
Anyone else ever find anything interesting?
-LBJ
Former Member
Originally posted by jswim
I saw a giant wadded up ball of hair once!
(though I didn't pick it up)
Ooops, sorry, I should know better then to cough-up haiballs in the pool.
I was a lifeguard at a water park near Allentown, PA for a summer during college, and they would have 1 person just hunt for missing items for the last half of the day (as long as everyone showed up). It was amazing all the stuff people lost--wedding and engagement rings, cash (large sums), watches, and just anything you can think of. Most of it seemed to be on the lazy river, which was good...if I did it I'd just put on goggles and swim along, looking in all the corners to make sure. I did find some high-value objects (as well as sentimental), but we were not allowed to take a reward.
More recently, in my backyard pool, I've found lots of different critters. Have a floating thermometer which seems to attract snakes, and have found mice, rats, rabbits, etc. The yard is walled in, but I'm on a corner with drainage holes that they can enter through.
One of the outdoor pools I used to work at I remember one morning we found a salamander in one of the drainage holes. It was nasty. It had been in the water all weekend (this was on a Monday) and it was all bloated and waterlogged. Felt bad for it, but I was glad I wasn't the one that had to fish it out.
Originally posted by Guvnah
For me the best has been the occasional penny or quarter...
Although, when I was a kid we used to belong to a summer swim club, they would have an annual cookout. One of the games for the kids was that they would throw a ton of coins into the pool and we would dive for them. Mostly pennies, but a good share of other coins. They broke it up by age group so that the big kids didn't muscle all the loot from the little kids. And in each age group there was one silver dollar added to the stash. That was the grand prize.
And another game was to dump a couple hundred little goldfish (yes, live, swimming fish) into the pool and we would catch and take them home. They even had de-chlorination drops available for us to put into the cups and tupperwares we had for the transport home.
Did we belong to the same pool as kids (in NY)?? Ours did the same thing. We also had the greased watermelon game for the adults. *sigh* we moved before I was allowed to play that game.
Originally posted by DRBOB
Just tonight I found a very large 3" olive, green with a red pamento in it at the bottom of the pool. At first I thought it was a dead trout.
The real tragedy is, we'll never know what happened to the rest of the martini!
Originally posted by aquageek
I got assaulted by one of those things recently. Got all hung up on my goggles. It might have had some imbedded phlegm in it holding it together as well. It was quite unsettling.
Hair isn't the worst thing you'll find in a pool. I'll refrain from saying what is...
