Message In A Bottle

One year ago, off the coast of Oregon, a 10-year-old Oregon boy wrote a note on binder paper, stuck it into a bottle and tossed it into the Pacific Ocean. A few weeks ago and 2,000 miles away, a 9-year-old girl walking on a Hawaii shoreline found the bottle floating in a tide pool.

Message in a bottle

Thomas Craig, now 11, of Silverton Ore., never expected the bottle he threw into Winchester Bay during a family fishing trip to arrive safely in anyone’s hands until he recently received an email from Trinity Ballesteros, of Kailua-Kona.

“I couldn’t believe someone had found it. I was shocked,” he said. “When I threw it overboard, it hit the top of my grandpa’s boat so I thought it broke and sank. The chances of someone finding it seemed like a once-in-a-million type thing.”

Trinity was beachcombing along the shore in front of the Queen Liliuokalani Children’s Center in Kailua-Kona when she spotted the old fashioned-looking bottle. “My first thought was what if someone is really in trouble and they’re sending out an SOS,” she said. “Would I even be able to help? Were they lost at sea or stuck on a deserted island? Were they even in Hawaii?”

Surrounded by friends and family, Trinity opened the bottle and found the letter, which read, “Dear finder of my message, My name is Thomas and I live in Oregon. I’m ten years old and this week I’m salmon fishing deep in the ocean. I would like to hear from you.”

Thomas asked for a response and included his mother’s email address.

Since then, the two children have been exchanging emails and plan to become pen pals.

Near Florida, a man found another message in a bottle that had been floating for 50 years. A hotel owner had put the message out to sea with a note that said anyone who returns the bottle to the hotel will get a $150 reward.

The reward was, according to the man’s daughter, a joke the man was playing on his wife, who managed the hotel. He thought it would be fun to see her reaction when a stranger came in asking for $150.

The man who found the message tracked down the man’s daughter, who now runs her late father’s hotel. The woman’s reaction was pure shock and disbelief, mixed with a lot of memories of her father’s playfulness.

One of the most touching stories goes back to 1979. Dorothy and John Henry Peckham threw a message into the Pacific Ocean while on a cruise. Six years later the bottle was picked up by 31-year-old Hoa Van Nguyen in Southeast Asia. A correspondence began that led to the Peckhams helping sponsor Nguyen and his family’s immigration to the United States.

Message in a bottle….how amazing it can sometimes be!