Fierce bidding for wedding thimble!

Bridezillas on a rampage?
OK, maybe not fierce bidding, but a lot of last minute bidding for this delicious wedding thimble up for auction from one of my favorite eBay vendors, Trollacht. This thimble supposedly [update: see comment or The 'Wedding' thimble. Thank You! ]would have been given as a token of romantic affectionwith its decorative band still attached, with the intention that the band would eventually be detached to become the recipient's wedding band.
Anyway, the opening bid for this thimble was US$9.00 at 4:34 pm on April 23rd. From there the bids crept up to about US$30.00 by May 1st. There it lolled around until early May 3rd when it popped up to the mid-$40ish range. At this point the actual high bid was US$65.03, but since the "high" bid on eBay is really the second highest bid plus a fixed amount--here probably a dollar--the on-screen high bid was, again, mid-$40ish. The auction was due to end May 3, 2009 12:25:00 PDT. At 12:19:01, six minutes before the auction's end, a bidder bid US$61.76, which meant that the on-screen high bid was listed at US$62.76 until 12:24:45 PDT, 15 seconds before auction's end, the bids shot up:

• 12:24:45 - US $95.58
• 12:24:50 - US $181.00
• 12:24:53 - US $183.50, winning bid (actual bid surely higher), posted 7 seconds before close of auction

I don't know if the winning bidder used some kind of auction sniper, which places one's bid at the last possible moment before an auction closes, but a review of this bidder's past auction wins shows that the winning bids were all the only bids the person placed on the items and the bids were all in the last hour of the auction. EBay admonishes bidders to bid high early on to ensure eventual victory, but bidders like to hold off to the end to get the best deal. Sometimes one hopes that no one else will find the little gem one has one's heart set on winning, and thus doesn't want to draw attention to it by bidding. This works an incredibly small amount of the time. Usually eagle-eyed collectors all spot the good stuff and hold off until the last moment when they pile in with high bids. Like in this case.
I don't use auction snipers on eBay. If I need to I can get the bid in really close to the auction's end time (I've gotten it as close as 3 seconds--it's part of the fun to try), but sometimes I'm just not going to be the highest bidder, period. I saw it would be that way with this item, so I didn't bid at all.