Have any of you ever put a message into a bottle? You printed your name and address, screwed on the cap or corked it and threw it into the water. Then, you forgot about it. Where it went and what route it took was not even remotely in your mind until someone actually finds one. Then, maybe you'll think about flinging one off a wharf or a boat years and years before.
This morning, I read about such an incident in the Santa Barbara News-Press, in a special section entitled, California & The West. About 21 years ago, a little girl in the 4th grade at the North City School in the Shoreline School District of a Seattle suburb put a message in a plastic soda bottle. Emily Hawaung and the rest of her class were studying the ocean and learning about folks in distant lands. The teacher typed out a form letter and each student wrote his name and address on the bottom of each letter. A friend of the teacher, Carol Aguayo, took the bottles and threw them into the Pacific.
Twenty-one years later, Merle Brandell, a bear hunting guide and manager of a local water plant of Nelson Lagoon was beachcombing around the tiny fishing village in Alaska on the Bering Sea. He found the bottle and tried to locate Emily. Eventually, he tracked her down. She is now a thirty year old accountant named Emily Shih. She had forgotten about the project. The letter in the bottle travelled 1,735 miles.
Do you know of such a find? Have you ever written a message and put it into a bottle? Thanks for reading this. Salud.
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Comments: 48
I guess a lot of people sailing etc. do that?
Neat story there, it must have been fun to connect like that.
Take care.
I think you must have been off on one of your internet-less expeditions last summer when I did the Gather Message in a Bottle. I had something like 230 comments, where this community said hello to the Bottle Finder People and told where they were located. When the thread finally died, I printed it out (about 25 pages!) along with a hand written letter with as much personal contact information as I could think of for both me and my husband. We sealed it in a a ginormous pretzel jug and flagged it with florescent colors so it wouldn't look like rubbish. We threw it out into Lake Erie about a month later (I wrote an article about THAT, too) and haven't heard a thing about it.
My biggest hope is that it would make it all the way to Canada and not wash up on a neighboring beach. My pie-in-the-sky dream would be that it would make it all the way out of the St. Lawrence Seaway and hit Europe.
Great story. It gives new meaning to the expression, "what goes around, comes around."
Cheers,
Colonel Possum
I have seen in movies but never tried but after reading your story I wish to try once.How sweet of you. I love your sweey litle ways to bring smiles on our faces..
adorable
And I've never sent a message out in a bottle, but now you've got me to thinking. Maybe I should!
Incredible story and that lady must have been amazed to think that her bottle was found so many years later. Must be a reason.
One of the things we would do when it rained was to craft little 'Kon Tiki' boats by carving wood pieces that we would lash together into catamarans with small cloth sails and rigging and all. It took days to make them.
We would put messages on them and sail them across seas, or lakes or down rivers. Never heard back from them, or expect to. But on my 49th birthday, it is a joy to remember.
Thanks!