A Washington County woman lost her wedding ring in the ocean at a beach hours away. A stranger found it the next day.

Kelsey Battease and her sons were on a day trip to beautiful Hampton Beach in New Hampshire. She her two little boys were enjoying the waves, the sand and the sun.

“We were walking in the water, and I was holding my 2-year-old’s hand, and we had switched hands because the waves were getting really big and knocking him over,” she said. “So in the process of switching hands, my ring had slipped off and then I almost immediately I realized I had just dropped it in the water.”

Battease said she was searching frantically but could not find it.

“I almost gave up immediately because the way the waves were coming in, I was like there’s no way I’m going to find it,” she said.

Her 2-year-old said that his father and her father would be mad.

Her mom suggested that she post about her lost ring to the Hampton Beach Facebook page.

Almost immediately, Battease said people were jumping in to help.

She was contacted by Arthur Fleming, who lives about an hour away from the beach. He left 5 a.m. the very next morning with his metal detector and he searched for hours.

“He was about to give up, and then he had found it. And the time that I saw the picture that he found it on Facebook was almost to the minute and 24 hours after I lost it,” she said. “I still can’t believe that he found it. Unbelievable.”

Fleming said he spent around 4 to 4 ½ hours searching without success.

“I get knocked over by one wave because I was paying more attention to the sounds the machine was making than the waves,” he said.

Fleming said he hadn’t eaten or drank anything since 5:30 a.m. He felt like he was fading.

“I’ve been out in the sun, and I’m like ‘this isn’t going to happen today,’” he said.

On the way back to his car, the metal detector started beeping. He dug in that spot and there it was.

Fleming decided to make the six-hour round trip to deliver the ring because Battease’s family has three young sons and they just started football, and there wasn’t a convenient meetup point.

He didn’t want to mail it.

“I’m old enough to see enough of life to understand the irony of getting it from the ocean, but losing it in a mailing service,” he said.

Fleming has a white mustache and bushy eyebrows and looks like Santa Claus.

“Everyone’s saying that he’s the real-life Santa Claus,” she said.