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Message In A Bottle

Mighty_Emperor

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Boy Gets Response to Message in Bottle

Sun May 2,10:37 PM ET


FLAGLER BEACH, Fla. - It didn't make it across the Atlantic, but 7-year-old Dylan Goodman got a long-distance answer to a message put in a bottle that was thrown in the ocean.


His floating note sent March 4 said: "Hi. My name is Dylan. I'm 7 years old and if you find this message, please write back."

A surprising reply, postmarked in Jork, Germany, several weeks later, had the first-grader, his family and friends wondering how the bottle could have made the 4,637-mile journey.

What the message didn't say was that the bottle made only a short trip.

"I found the bottle in Flagler Beach," explained Sybille Lohse, who answered the youngster's note.

"We stay seven months in Germany, five months in Flagler Beach," she said. "I found the bottle in the middle of March. We go back to Germany end of March."

The reality was disappointing to Dylan's mom, Kelly Goodman.

"In a way, I wish we never knew that," she said Saturday. "But I guess the mystery is solved. It was kind of bizarre that it would get there that quickly."

Goodman said Dylan and his sister Megan, 10, had each tossed a bottle out to sea on the morning of Megan's birthday. It was something she had done as a child and she thought it would be fun for the kids.

Source
 
I once sent a message in a bottle; I threw it in the sea at Whitley Bay some time during the 70s, but never got a reply.

Carole
 
I remember as a kid, (mid '60's), a friend throwing a message in a bottle into the local stream.

It was picked out about five miles down stream & returned & he was charged double postage, as the returnee, didn't put a stamp on the letter!!!!!!
 
http://www.conwasa.demon.co.uk/bottle.htm

Welcome to the Message in a bottle server located at Brighton UK

Enter a message here and it will be printed off, put in a bottle and thown from Brigton Pier on the south coast of England.

Where the bottle goes depends on a combination of wind and waves. Waves and tide are the most important factor and tends to carry things towards the west. The prevailing wind comes from the south west.

To use this fantastic service, enter your message here:

Fantastic indeed. :yeay:
 
I once tossed a message in a bottle into the Florida Straits on a school boat trip. Several years later, I got a letter from a fisherman on the far side of Cuba that had found the bottle. (This was pre-Mariel boatlift, tail end of the Cold War, so an American getting a letter from some random Cuban was quite unusual.)
 
Bottle message saves lost vessel

Costa Rican officials say 86 shipwrecked migrants have been rescued after fishermen found a message in a bottle they had thrown overboard.
The migrants, mainly teenagers from Ecuador and Peru, had been adrift in their packed boat for three days.

[...]

The smugglers stripped the boat of radio and communication equipment when they left it.

"Incredibly [...] these people, who are quite young, wrote a message saying: 'Please Help Us' and put it in a bottle," said Francisco Estrada of marine protection group MarViva.

The bottle, and the SOS message it contained, was found by local fishermen who alerted the park wardens, the only inhabitants of the island, a world heritage site.

[...]

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/w ... 594591.stm
Published: 2005/05/30 23:58:03 GMT

© BBC MMV
 
A very odd story indeed:

Floating ideas

What could be more romantic than a maths message in a bottle?

Marc Abrahams
Tuesday July 12, 2005
The Guardian

Almost nothing is more romantic than a mathematical theorem - if that theorem is stuffed into a bottle and cast adrift during a perilous sea voyage in wartime, and if the person who wrote it is one of the world's top mathematicians. Shizuo Kakutani, who died last August, threw many such bottles into the ocean more than 60 years ago. Their fate is a complete mystery.

Kakutani went on to become a legendary mathematician. Like most famous mathematicians, his fame is mostly among those in his profession.

Indirectly, though, the public is almost aware of Kakutani, for two reasons. The movie and book A Beautiful Mind was about the mathematician John Nash. Nash's most famous concept, the Nash equilibrium, is based on the Kakutani fixed-point theorem. And Kakutani's daughter, Michiko, is the most influential book reviewer at the New York Times.

The story of Kakutani's bottled theorems has only just now been told outside the tight circles of those who really, truly, deeply understand the nature of, well, circles. Stanley Eigen, a mathematics professor at Northeastern University in Boston, wrote an appreciation of his longtime collaborator and friend. He published it in the Annals of Improbable Research.

Eigen explains: "At the start of world war two, Kakutani was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. With the outbreak of war he was given the option of staying at the institute or returning to Japan. He chose to return.

"So he was put on a Swedish ship which sailed across the Atlantic, down around the Cape, and up to Madagascar, or thereabouts, where he and other Japanese were traded for Americans on a ship from Japan.

"The trip across the Atlantic was long and hard. What, you may wonder, did Kakutani do? He proved theorems. Every day, he sat on deck and worked on his mathematics. Every night, he took his latest theorem, put it in a bottle and threw it overboard. Each one contained the instruction that if found it should be sent to the institute in Princeton. To this day, not a single letter has been received."

Is there much chance of finding them? No one knows. There is precious little scholarship about messages found in bottles. Robert Kraske's too-slim book The Twelve Million Dollar Note: Strange But True Tales of Messages Found in Seagoing Bottles. The messages-in-bottles collection at the Turks and Caicos National Museum. The rubber-ducks-and-other-things-that-wash-up-on-beaches research of Seattle-based oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. These, our greatest chronicler/gatherers, have so far disappointed us in the case of Kakutani.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekl ... 17,00.html

The bookcan can be found cheap as chips at Amazon.com (I assume theya re the same book):

The twelve million dollar note: And other strange but true sea stories by Robert Kraske
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0006YN ... enantmc-20

The twelve million dollar note: Strange but true tales of messages found in seagoing bottles by Robert Kraske
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0840765 ... enantmc-20

I also found this:

The Voyager's Stone: The Adventures of a Message-Carrying Bottle Adrift on the Ocean Sea
Robert Kraske, Brian Floca (Illustrator)
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/05310 ... ntmagaz-21
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0531068 ... enantmc-20

Gr. 4-6. Although written as a fictional account of a message-carrying bottle, this book really explores oceanography--currents, animals, and the variety of life found at the margins of the world's oceans. While on a Caribbean vacation, a boy from Minnesota puts a message in a bottle. His note is eventually retrieved by a girl living on Australia's north coast. The text is particularly well detailed when it considers predation and the food chain, and the drawings by Brian Floca that record the bottle's journey are at their best when they picture animals. The book may appeal more to children already fascinated by the subject: it's a much more appealing approach than the usual stuffy overview of current charts and facts.
 
I put a message in a bottle and thre it in the Thames at cricklade some years back. (1991 I think)

no reply.

But what true fortean hasnt ever attempted this?
 
Homo Aves said:
I put a message in a bottle and thre it in the Thames at cricklade some years back. (1991 I think)

no reply.

But what true fortean hasnt ever attempted this?
Yep, Southend 1975, also no reply. :cry:
 
Pete Younger said:
Homo Aves said:
I put a message in a bottle and thre it in the Thames at cricklade some years back. (1991 I think)

no reply.

But what true fortean hasnt ever attempted this?
Yep, Southend 1975, also no reply. :cry:
A lot of rocky coasts around the world where a bottle will be smashed to smithereens, and its enclosures would be saturated, then ripped to shreds. Or caught in the screw of a supertanker with similar results.

You may dream about where and when your bottles met their grisly fate!


And I don't think I ever have thrown a message in the sea. Confused by which was ecologically the better option, glass or plastic bottles, I suppose...

It's all litter, in the end, and potentially harmful.
 
Yeah, same reason I havn't done it. It would be interesting to see if I got a reply, but the Earth's allready polluted enough without me adding to it by doing silly experiments.
 
RainyOcean said:
Yeah, same reason I havn't done it. It would be interesting to see if I got a reply, but the Earth's allready polluted enough without me adding to it by doing silly experiments.

Nothing polluting about a glass bottle and cork, if it survives ok, if it smashes it returns to it's original state.
Ye gods, is romance dead?
 
A few years ago I threw 10 small plastic (!) bottles of a bridge near the Swiss village of Oberdiessbach. I had put my e-mail address inside the bottles. A few weeks later I received 3 replies from people who had found the bottles, some even with a link to an Internet map. One bottle had made it into a riverside swimming pool in Bern. So not more than 10-20 km.

In theory they could have gone all the way to the Rhine and into the ocean :?

Maybe this year I'll repeat the experiment. It was fun. (The empty bottles were useless trash anyway. I just didn't throw them in the dustbin ...)
 
uair01 said:
In theory they could have gone all the way to the Rhine and into the ocean :?
The lower Rhine flows through Holland, where it is heavily canalised and controlled by locks and barrages. The Dutch are keen on keeping their waterways clean, too, so the chance of a bottle reaching the open sea would seem slight.

The trouble with glass bottles is they break into sharp fragments.
Scenario:
High tide, and a wave smashes a bottle against the sea wall.
Low tide, and children come to play on the beach...

OUCH!

(Sure, given time the sea will grind the fragments into harmless glass pebbles, but in the meantime they are a danger.)
 
Bottle's message from the grave

Bottle's message from the grave

John Thompson found the 41-year-old message
A message in a bottle has been found washed up on a Cumbrian coastline 41 years after being thrown into the sea.
The bottle, with the message "Please reply" was thrown into the sea in July 1964 by 13-year-old Kevin Wainhouse, from Moston, in Manchester.

While out walking in Cark-in-Cartmel recently, John Thompson found it and began a search for the owner.

Kevin's brother was traced but he revealed Kevin had died aged 33. The bottle will be returned to his family.

The message was written on the back of a chocolate wrapper and placed inside a cola bottle, sealed with a cork.

It was spooky - like a message from the grave

Tony Wainhouse

It is thought to have been thrown into the sea on the North West coast.

Mr Thompson said: "It had been beaten and battered about and it's a good job they produced strong cola bottles in those days.

"It could have been around the world a couple of times for all I know."

He stuck together the wet wrapper and made out the name Kevin and part of an address Moston, Manchester.


Kevin Wainhouse, who died young, wrote the message in 1964

Kevin's brother, Tony Wainhouse, 38, was told of the appeal and saw the handwriting.

He said: "It was spooky - like a message from the grave."

Their mother, Mary, said it brought back poignant memories: "It makes me remember him.

"It took me a long time to get over him dying like that. I was dumbstruck, amazed."

The two sides of the story will meet shortly and the bottle and message returned to the family.

Mr Thompson said: "It would have been nice to be able to get in contact with Kevin and have a drink and see what had happened over the past 41 years. It's very sad."




http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4458992.stm
 
Source
Sailor Gets Angry Reply to Bottle Message

NAPEAGUE, N.Y. (AP) - A sailor who sent a message out to sea in a bottle says he received a reply from England - accusing him of littering. "I kind of felt like no good deed goes unpunished," Harvey Bennett, 55, told the East Hampton Star.

The plastic bottle was one of five that Bennett placed in the ocean off Long Island in August.

Last week, he excitedly opened a letter from England, and was stunned by the reply:

"I recently found your bottle while taking a scenic walk on the beach by Poole Harbour. While you may consider this some profound experiment on the path and speed" of "oceanic currents, I have another name for it, litter."

"You Americans don't seem to be happy unless you are mucking about somewhere," says the letter, signed by Henry Biggelsworth of Bournemouth, in Dorset County.

Bennett, who has a picture of the queen of England in his Amagansett tackle shop, says that Poole Harbor is just a short distance from Weymouth Harbor. That's where the Bennett family embarked for America in 1644.

The New York Post carried the report on Friday, giving attribution to the East Hampton Star.

Bennett did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press on Friday.
Made me laugh :D
 
Made me laugh too, I read it in the paper this morning!
 
Mass. Bottle Message Ends Up in Africa

Mar 10, 4:13 PM (ET)

LYNN, Mass. (AP) - A message in a bottle launched in Massachusetts two years ago has traveled halfway around the world. In a letter postmarked from Morocco, 26-year-old Assila Ahmed wrote that he'd found a bottle thrown into the water by Genevive Hernandez of Lynn.

Hernandez, now a 13-year-old seventh grader, was among group of fifth-graders who on Nov. 20, 2003 put messages in bottles and cast them off from Lynn's shores that stormy day. Hernandez said she's amazed that her green Sprite bottle made it as far as it did since most of them either bounced right back to shore or ended up only as far as the Cape.

"I thought it wasn't going anywhere," said Hernandez. "Mine was stuck on the seaweed."

Students received replies from 14 people before Hernandez received hers. Most were from the Cape Cod area. One made it as far as England.

But Hernandez's bottle had, by far, the longest journey, traveling 3,500 miles.

In the letter to Hernandez, Ahmed said he found the bottle about 10:30 a.m. on Dec. 18, 2005. Hernandez' bright orange card wrapped in plastic bore the address the Brickett School in Lynn, where she attended classes two years ago.

The only request from the African man: a letter back from Hernandez.

Hernandez's teacher fifth-grade teacher at Brickett, Sheila Thomas, said he will get one.

Thomas recalled the stormy day the bottles were launched.

"The bottles kept coming back up on the rocks and I ended up getting down in the water and getting them back out," she said. "It was not an easy launch - I ended up soaking wet up to my knees."

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060310/D8G8UO7O6.html
 
Girl's message in a bottle reaches New Zealand

A six-year-old girl has caused a conundrum of global proportions after her attempts to send a message in a bottle to Norway ended up in New Zealand.

While on holiday with her grandparents on the north-east coast of Scotland, Keely Reid tossed a plastic water bottle into the Moray Firth in the expectant hope that the tide might carry it as far as the shores of Scandinavia.

However the girl and her family have been surprised to discover the bottle ended up travelling more than 20,000 miles in 47 days to be washed up on the beach of Whangamata on the north island of New Zealand.

The discarded bottle was apparently picked up by another six-year-old, James Wilson of Whangamata, who discovered the message inside and immediately wrote to Keely with proof that he had found it.

It is estimated that to find its way to New Zealand in such a short time the bottle must have travelled an average of 425 miles per day at almost 18 miles per hour.

In the 1860s, the clipper ship Thermopylae created a new fastest time from London to Australia of 63 days.

Even a modern day luxury cruise to New Zealand can take up to 40 days, including a short cut travelling through the Panama or Suez canals - so the fact the bottle arrived in Whangamata in little more than six weeks is mysterious.

Claire Matthews of the Macduff Marine Aquarium, which is situated just a few miles from where Keely threw her bottle into the sea, said New Zealand was about the last place she would think the bottle could or would have ended up. 'This bottle should really have become stuck in the Atlantic. I can't understand how it would have got off track like this and ended up in New Zealand.' 'I can't see how it got to New Zealand. Did somebody maybe pick it up and fly it to New Zealand? It is a bit of a mystery,' admits Pearl Reid, Keely's grandmother. Keely is not so surprised. Three years ago she dropped another bottle with a message into the sea at Aberdour and, two years later, it was recovered by a swimmer off the Dutch coast. 'It is brilliant, this bottle travelled farther than I ever have,' said Keely. However experts in ocean currents at the Fisheries Research Station laboratories in Aberdeen are under no doubt there must have been human intervention. 'As a scientist I would usually hedge my bets and leave room for some possibility but there is absolutely no way the bottle could have made it to New Zealand on its own, it must have been picked up by somebody,' said Dr Bill Turrell. 'There is no way it could have been picked up by some freak weather system - things just don't cross the equator. I don't like to shatter the poor girl's imaginings but there is no way it could happen.'

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_b ... 868083.ece
 
But what kind of person picks up a bottle - with message - in Scotland and flies it to a beach in New Zealand? Wouldn't it have been found even sooner or did the prankster hang onto it for a couple of months?
 
I have always toyed with the idea of tossing one out into the sea (fnarr) but I haven't actually done it. I think it would have to be a glass one; taking the chance of it breaking but at least if it does, it will be ground down naturally.
Of course, if you still think it's littering, you can always bury a time capsule instead. I used to make them up as a child, forget to bury them, find them at the back of a drawer much later and be embarrassed at my childish scribblings of the year before. So it was in a way like burying it- my room was quite the tip in my childhood days!
I wish I'd actually got round to burying one, though. It would be interesting to see what I thought would be fun to bury in my garden over 15 years ago.
 
Kondoru said:
I put a message in a bottle and thre it in the Thames at cricklade some years back. (1991 I think)

no reply.

But what true fortean hasnt ever attempted this?

For me it was tying notes on the strings of helium balloons and letting them go. I never got a reply.
 
kirmildew said:
I have always toyed with the idea of tossing one out into the sea (fnarr) but I haven't actually done it. I think it would have to be a glass one; taking the chance of it breaking but at least if it does, it will be ground down naturally.
Of course, if you still think it's littering, you can always bury a time capsule instead. I used to make them up as a child, forget to bury them, find them at the back of a drawer much later and be embarrassed at my childish scribblings of the year before. So it was in a way like burying it- my room was quite the tip in my childhood days!
I wish I'd actually got round to burying one, though. It would be interesting to see what I thought would be fun to bury in my garden over 15 years ago.

Blue Peter serves as a warning against time capsules. When they dug up both of their's from the BP garden in the year 2000 they found the contents soggy and dirty from the soil and concluded they'd have been better off storing them on top of a wardrobe.
 
Romantics clamour to write by sea-mail
Will Pavia

Even by Royal Mail’s standards it must be Britain’s least effective postal service.

Ten years ago Stuart Conway, 45, set up a website offering to take people’s messages, put them in a bottle and lob them into the Channel from the end of Brighton Pier.

The self-employed data administrator has now “delivered” nearly seven thousand messages. He also made his program free for others to copy, helping to create nearly thirty other “message in a bottle” services from Australia to the coasts of the Americas, sending another 8,000 messages bobbing into the briney.

The sea may be beautiful and unfathomable, but these are not particularly useful qualities for a postman. As far as Mr Conway knows, only 20 or so messages have ever been found. This does not deter the senders, whose notes continue to pour from his printer in an upstairs room of his house in Hove. Some are general suggestions to no one in particular. “Don’t take anyone else’s advice,” advises a 14-year-old girl from Germany.

Others seek advice, such as the teenage girl who likes her boyfriend very much, but likes sleeping with another friend better, and the 17-year-old boy from Spain who thinks that his life is over and is contemplating suicide.

Mr Conway places messages mourning a death in champagne bottles, in the hope that they will last longer.

Many senders are placing lonely hearts advertisements. “Female, over 40, full of dreams,” runs one. “If you are male, over 40, full of dreams, contact me.”

An Italian woman aged 22 is moving to Brighton and hopes to find friends. “It was tempting to reply saying ‘I’ll take you for a drink, sweetie’,” Mr Conway said, but his free service carries a promise of confidentiality, and he never tries to contact the senders.

He says that when he reads their messages he often feels like a priest hearing a confession. At least a third of them concern unrequited love, mainly from women who still care for a former husband or boyfriend.

What is perhaps more surprising is the many thousands of notes addressed to specific individuals. An old man from Brazil writes to his two daughters who now live in Japan.

“I still hope that you will come back to Brazil some day before I die,” he writes. “If you happen to see this message, please get in touch.”

Some of the messages are addressed to American soldiers serving in Iraq, and there are many from people seeking to contact a former lover. They do not have the address, and seem to believe that a message in a bottle is the next best thing.

To provide bottles, Mr Conway is forced to drink a lot of beer, :D and scrounge from friends and overflowing bottle banks. As the tide turns, behind the Waltzer at the end of the pier, he leans back and throws them into the yellow-brown waves. The bottles set off in the direction of Cherbourg, but each day they will be dragged ten miles east and west by the changing tides.

A lucky few may make it into the Atlantic, and on towards Iceland, but of those that have been found, most have landed on sandy beaches in northern Brittany, the Netherlands and Germany. One made it through the Strait of Dover, and washed up among fish boxes on the North Sea island of Amrum.

Only one reached the intended recipient without delay. “It was to a Swedish language student in Brighton, from her boyfriend,” Mr Conway said. “I went and put it on her doorstep. It seemed stupid to throw it in the sea.”

Over and out

- In 1914 Private Thomas Hughes, later to die in the trenches, threw a bottle into the Channel from a troop carrier. It was found in the Thames Estuary in 1999, and the message delivered to his wife, by then 87 and living in New Zealand

- In 2005 a four-year-old girl’s message in a bottle travelled from Morecambe Bay to Perth, Australia, in six months

- The same year a US coastguard’s message in a bottle from New York was found on a beach in Poole Harbour by a man who wrote back accusing him of littering

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 398034.ece
 
Penpals meet on beach where message in a bottle was found 40 years ago
A British mother has met her American pen pal on the beach where she found her friend's message in a bottle exactly 40 years ago.
By Richard Savill
Last Updated: 11:14PM BST 24 Jul 2008

Rosalind Hearse was just eight when she found the bottle which had been thrown over the side of a cruise ship in the Atlantic in 1968.

Three months later, it was washed up on a beach in south Wales, containing the message from American Sandra Morris, now Mrs Morris-Czapla, who was also eight.

The two girls started writing to each other and have been in touch ever since.

Mrs Morris-Czapla, 48, met with her friend on Thursday and visited Morfa beach, near Margam, South Wales, where the bottle was washed ashore.

Mrs Morris-Czapla had been on a ship returning to America following a family holiday in Europe when she wrote on a postcard "Whoever finds this bottle write to me at..."

In Wales, Rosalind, now Mrs Causey, was walking on the beach with her father Ken, a headmaster, when she spotted something glinting on the sand.

She opened the wine bottle to read the note, and her reply marked the start of their friendship.

Mrs Causey, now an IT consultant living in Haverhill, Suffolk, said: "I took the cork from the wine bottle and replied to Sandra's little note.

"I used to love seeing the postman bring me a letter with a US Air Mail stamp, although in these modern times we have now moved on from sea-mail to e-mail.

"Our friendship grew through our letters as we shared amazingly parallel lives.

"We each have two children, a boy and girl, and our eldest were born just 10 days apart."

The pen pals met for the first time face-to-face in 1976 when Mrs Causey, and her husband Mark, a chartered surveyor flew to America.

Mrs Morris-Czapla, who lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, Doug, a golf club manager, said: "It was lovely to visit the spot and it was a great way to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a very unusual friendship.

"You often hear stories of messages in a bottle floating thousands of miles but how often do you hear of people actually meeting up and making a connection as a result?"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... s-ago.html
 
Deceased postman becomes celebrity in Holland after ashes wash up there
A deceased postman has become an unlikely celebrity in Holland after his ashes washed up there.


Last Updated: 4:15PM GMT 14 Nov 2008

After John Lea's cremation, one of his sons put his ashes in a bottle with photographs of Mr Lea and a few details about his life, such as the fact that he had been in the army and travelled a lot

Kevin Lea, 48, then dropped the bottle from a ferry half way across the Channel while on a trip to France after deciding his father needed "one last big adventure". 8)

It has since twice come ashore in Holland, leading to his father appearing in national papers and on TV.

Mr Lea senior, from Weymouth, Dorset, died last summer aged 78, leaving behind wife Pat and eight of his nine children.

His ashes were split into three parts; one buried at his favourite tree, another by his daughter's grave and the third part thrown into the sea.

Just a few weeks later Kevin received a letter from a couple in Holland, Peter and Rita de Man, who had found the bottle washed up on one of the country's islands.

They had returned it to the sea as requested, and days later it came ashore again on the same island, Texel.

This time it was found by Maarten Brugge who alerted the local paper and from there dead John's fame grew.

Kevin, who runs a launderette, said: "When I was contacted by Maarten he said he'd told the local paper and then it was picked up by the big national paper De Telegraaf.

"I lived in Holland for ten years and I can speak Dutch, which surprised them, and then I was contacted by the national TV channel Hart Van Nederland. I spoke to them and they showed all the pictures of dad and the feedback has been incredible.

"He's turned into a bit of a celebrity over there - I think he would have really liked that. I thought that it would be nice for dad to go on one last big adventure, and hopefully it is continuing.

"I bought a clear plastic contaioner that looked robust and waterproof and put in photos of dad and his obituary from the local paper. His ashes were in a camera film container and I wrote a descritpion of dad and what he had done during his life.

"The last person who found him said he was going to get the bottle taken out to sea by a fisherman, so perhaps it might come ashore in Denmark or Germany next.

"Dad had been in the army and worked as a postman, milkman and nightclub manager and during his life did a lot of work for charity. He has a wonderfully jolly man and it's great to think that he is still putting smiles on people's faces." :D

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... there.html
 
A sad little tale...

French love letter found on beach

A French love letter and a lock of hair have been discovered in a bottle after washing up on a Cornish beach.

Martin Leslie, a coastguard manager, discovered the bottle at Praa Sands when he was clearing debris from the beach in west Cornwall.

The bottle, which was sealed with candle wax, was sent on 28 September.

It was written in French by an unnamed woman who poured out her feelings and understandings for her lover who had to return to his wife.

The letter which, Mr Leslie tried to translate using the internet, found lots of references to love, death and missing someone.

He said: "I assumed that it was a suicidal note that we came across. I contacted Falmouth coastguard who sent it to our counterparts in France.

"It was found to be a love letter. She explained they had a good time together. She loves him but understands he has to return to his wife, and hopes she will find a man like him to live a beautiful life."

The letter did not include a name or address.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/8329295.stm
 
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