Island School students return lost Navy ring after 50 years

A ring lost for more than 50 years came back to the family of retired Navy Capt. Jon Paul Scott after five Island School eighth-graders and their parents found it on the reef off Camp Naue and traced its owner through the inscriptions inside.

The ring surfaced on June 13 during a camping trip at Camp Naue in Hāena, the YMCA of Kauai camp facility on the North Shore near Tunnels Beach and the start of the Na Pali Coast. The boys, Nathaniel Knickel, Levi Hovland, Mateo Morgado, Finn Scarbo and Cade Ormond, were there with their families when a caretaker suggested a reef walk at low tide during a King Tide and a large southerly swell. Knickel said that kind of exposure happens only about four or five days a year, and the ring was found in less than an hour, nestled between rocks on the reef.

What looked at first like a chance beach find turned into a small-scale detective effort. Heather Morgado said the parents and children used the internet to decipher the ring’s inscriptions and track down its owner. The search led them to Jon Paul Scott, a 1963 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and a retired U.S. Navy captain who died on March 26, 2011, at age 70 after a 28-year military career.

An obituary says Scott commanded the ballistic-missile submarine USS Lafayette from 1979 to 1984 and later served at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. For the Scott family, the ring was more than jewelry. U.S. Naval Academy class rings are treated as lasting family heirlooms, and this one had stayed with the family long after Scott’s death.

Peggy Scott, his widow, received the ring in New Hampshire by postal package on Monday, June 22, 2026. The reunion was arranged near the Island School sign and took place over speakerphone, with Kaulana Mossman of the Pacific Missile Range Facility helping coordinate the call. PMRF, at Barking Sands, is described by the Navy as the world’s largest instrumented multi-domain range.

There were no uniforms, bands or public ceremony, only a handful of Kauai families, one military widow and a long-mislaid ring returned to a home it had left decades earlier. Yet the path from Camp Naue’s reef to Peggy Scott’s hands linked Island School, Hāena, New Hampshire and a Navy career that began in Annapolis and ended with an heirloom finally making it back.