03 Monday Apr 2017
Posted in Friendship, message in a bottle, Mystery Message, Travel
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Can you tell I’m excited?
RAY FROM PHILLY HAS BEEN FOUND! And guess what? He’s awesome.
Y’all, when I found this message in a bottle, I confess, I thought it was a hopeless case. The bottle was falling apart, and the writing was so faded I couldn’t see anything. I was bummed.
29 Wednesday Mar 2017
Posted in archives of the sea, Flaschenpost, message in a bottle, ocean currents, Travel, weird news
Tags
grit, Inspiration, Mail Boat, message in a bottle, Outer Hebrides, Postal Service, RIchard Kearton, Scotland, St. Kilda
What if I told you that an entire community once used messages in bottles as their actual postal system?
Meet the Islands of St. Kilda.
23 Thursday Mar 2017
Posted in Friendship, history, message in a bottle, News, Travel
Tags
Durham Light Infantry, Emily Crowhurst, Inspiration, message in a bottle, Private Thomas Hughes, Steve Gowan, World War I
Imagine you lost your parents years ago. Imagine that today–decades after they passed–a stranger delivers to you a final letter from them. You thought you would never hear from them again. But here they are, one last time.
Emily Crowhurst never imagined she would receive such a letter. Through love, war, loss, and a dash of genealogical good fortune, that all changed one day in 1999.
***
Private Thomas Hughes, a soldier since 1905, was a member of the Durham Light Infantry in England. He was among the first soldiers called to the war in 1914. BritishArmedForces.org states that Private Hughes and his brothers-in-arms “landed at St Nazaire and made their way to the River Aisne, north of Rheims, where Germans were dug in. [Hughes] and 40 comrades died on September 21 [1914]. His body was never recovered and he is commemorated with 4,000 British ‘unknown soldiers’ at the La Ferte-Sous-Jouarre memorial.”
Colour Party of the 9th Battalion Durham Light Infantry, 1909. Photo from Wikipedia. Unknown source.
In other words, when Hughes died, Continue reading
02 Thursday Mar 2017
Posted in Friendship, Love, message in a bottle, Romance, Travel
Tags
cancun, Danielle, Excellence Riviera, Inspiration, message in a bottle, News, Puerto Morelos, wedding vows
A while back, a reader wrote to me of a lovely message in a bottle he and his wife had found while they were on vacation at Excellence Riviera Cancun north of Puerto Morelos, Mexico, in November of 2014. And now, finally, we are trying to find the person who sent that message in a bottle–but we need your help!
Here’s where the bottle was found:
23 Wednesday Nov 2016
Posted in Adventure, message in a bottle, Travel
Around this time last year, a woman named Sarah Hyde found a message in a bottle written in Spanish. With help from a friend, she discovered it amounted to a sort of prayer written by the sender, wishing for the safe passage of a family from Cuba to America.
I just wanted to share this story as we Continue reading
13 Sunday Nov 2016
Posted in message in a bottle, Travel
It was by pure luck that I found the senders of this message in a bottle, which I found in 2011:
It came from this sailboat in 2004: Continue reading
30 Sunday Oct 2016
Posted in Adventure, message in a bottle, Mystery Message, Travel
Five days after I found Kelvin’s message in a bottle, I was hiking with my brother on an uninhabited island when I found what looked like a calendar in a bottle with writing on the inside. Check out how rocky the shore is! Can you spot the bottle?
The calendar was for 2004, which would make it Continue reading
07 Wednesday Sep 2016
Posted in message in a bottle, Travel
Tags
beachcombing, Breda O'Sullivan, dog, dogs, Frank Hayostek, good news, happy news, lost and hound, message in a bottle, Sting
I love dogs. One thing I find so appealing about them is their remarkable curiosity. I know dogs who simply can’t sniff enough things in this life to be satisfied. Some of 9/11’s greatest heroes were dogs (and their handlers) who worked tirelessly to find people in the wreckage. This is to say nothing of the countless other natural disasters in which dogs have saved so many lives, including earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and more. When dogs and humans work together, we can accomplish amazing things. Just ask the ancient people who domesticated dogs to help with tasks like hunting, herding, and protecting home.
With all that in mind, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that so many dogs have found messages in bottles–but it still flips me out! So here’s a post dedicated to the pups who have found some truly fascinating messages in bottles–and at least one who saved a life.
Continue reading
17 Wednesday Feb 2016
Posted in Adventure, message in a bottle, Travel
Tags
Canterbury, Chaucer, Clint Buffington, Garden of England, Geoffrey Chaucer, Letterboxing, message in a bottle, Pilgrim's Way, public footpath
Here’s that bottle I found while shuffling past a bunch of plastic body parts on the beach in 2011:
10 Wednesday Feb 2016
Posted in Adventure, message in a bottle, Travel
There’s something beautiful but unsettling about cloudy days in the Caribbean. You expect every day on every Caribbean island to look more or less like a Corona commercial: blue skies, turquoise water, blinding white sand. When it’s not like that, something just feels…off. And so it was that I set out on a gray, cloudy beach hike May 26th, 2011 feeling all gray and cloudy myself.
Somehow, that mood transferred to my beachcombing and it affected what I saw. I kept zooming in on stuff like this:
