A Kona woman has been reunited with her high school ring, missing since 1970, after it made an improbable journey to the Virginia seashore.

For her senior year at Honokaa High School, Stephanie Ackerman received her Class of 1970 ring, a gold band set with a deep green peridot, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports. During a bus trip on the West Coast shortly after graduation, Ackerman misplaced the ring at a bus stop.

In August, Ackerman received a message from a New Jersey woman who found the ring as a child 40 years ago and had traced it back to her.

“It was quite a shock,” Ackerman said. “I couldn’t believe the whole thing.”

In a letter, the woman, Diane Fiumara-Chueiri, said her older sister found the ring in the sand while walking at Virginia Beach, Va., in 1977. The ring said “Honokaa Hawaii” and had the engraved initials “M.S.A.”

Fiumara-Chueiri, who was 10 at the time, doesn’t remember how she ended up with the ring, but she kept it and became attached to it. Sometimes, she said, she would wear it at her all-girls school in Brooklyn.

“When we left school, the boys from the all-boys school would be gathered outside the entrance,” she recalled. “And I would wear the ring to make them think I was a senior, that I was older than I was. Of course, I couldn’t let them get close enough to read it, because Hawaii and Brooklyn are not at all the same.”

Meanwhile, Ackerman moved to Kona, worked on a ranch and eventually became a director of the Kona Historical Society, but she never stopped thinking about the ring.

“I always hoped someone would find it,” she said.

Earlier this year Fiumara-Chueiri reached a staff member at Honokaa High, who traced the owner based on the initials.

Ackerman said she went into “shock mode” when she learned of the ring’s survival.

“I never thought I would see it again,” she said.

Hunting and trapping seem to curb feral pig population

HILO >> Hunting and trapping appear to be keeping down the number of feral pigs on the Big Island, wildlife officials said.

But getting a proper count is next to impossible, and the nature of wild pigs could make them seem more numerous in certain areas, said Ian Cole, natural-area specialist for the Hawaii Island Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

“It’s difficult. Homeowners in Puna might tell you pigs are running amok, and at the same time, hunters will say there are no pigs on the mountain,” Cole told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

The pigs do not stay in one place long enough to get an accurate tally because they’re constantly looking for food, he said.

A relative shortage of food in the highlands may have led more pigs to search for food near populated areas, Cole said.