(UPI) An Iowa man whose wedding ring plunged into the murky waters of a lake received some help from a pair of men with an underwater metal detector.

Steven Elonich said his ring fell into Lake Manawa while he was trying to coax his dog into jumping off a dock, leading him to search the lake for hours with his wife, Alexa, and his sister, Jordan Hofer.

"It was exhausting. It was deep enough that you couldn't just stand there; you had to swim or hold on to the dock," Steven Elonich told the Omaha World-Herald. It was a needle in the haystack.

Elonich said the loss of the ring was even more devastating because it had originally belonged to his father, who has stage four cancer.

He put out a plea for help on Facebook, and a high school friend shared it with her father, Tony Reese, a longtime member of theringfinders.com.

Reese said he and scuba diver Matthew Ryle have been preparing for a job to find a lost Rolex watch in a body of water in Nebraska, and searching for Elonich's ring sounded like good practice.

Reese, Ryle and Reese's fiancee and assistant, Rachel Dyrda, showed up to the lake with Elonich and were able to locate the ring in about an hour and a half.

Elonich said in a Facebook post he was "ecstatic" when Ryle emerged from the water with his ring.

"I'm not touching water with it ever again," Elonich said.

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