3,000 mile journey for message in a bottle

When an 11 years old girl threw a bottle into the Atlantic Ocean off New York State two years ago, little did she believe that it would travel three thousand miles to the West coast of Ireland, where it was found by a visiting scuba diver.

The find was poignant for Rory Golden of the Flagship Scuba Club in Dublin, as the bottle was located close to where he had placed the ashes of a friend some years before.

He was among a group that were on an annual pilgrimage to Aughris Peninsula, Claddaghduff, when the extraordinary discovery was made.

“Every year, I visit a dive site off Friar Island in Connemara, where I placed the ashes of a great friend of mine, Ralph White, who died seven years ago,” he told The Ray D’Arcy Show on Monday.

“He was a Titanic explorer, who went to the Titanic 35 times, and it was his wishes that his ashes be scattered around the world, so I put his ashes into a bottle, put them on the seabed in a little rocky outcome at 20m depth, so they are on a permanent dive, and we visit them every year.”

They were returning from the dive when he spotted a barnacle-encrusted bottle bobbing on the surface of the water.

“That area is riddled with lobster pots and buoys, so you’re keeping an eye out so you don’t get caught in them And about 500 yards away from the island, I saw an object that wasn’t a buoy; I slowed down to see it was a bottle, and we could see that the bottle was floating, and there was a message in it.”

The handwritten note was from an 11 year old girl named Natalie, who was from New York, but was holidaying with her family at the time:

“My name is Natalie, I’m throwing this bottle into the ocean at Quidnet Beach, on Nantucket Island, on August 13, 2013. If you find it, please write to me and tell me you found my 2013 message in a bottle.”

Rory managed to track down a phone number for Natalie, and eventually spoke to her father. He finally got to speak to the author herself on the Ray D’Arcy Show on Monday.

Natalie, who is now 13, throws a bottle into the ocean every summer with her dad.

“We wait for something like this to happen!” she told Ray D’Arcy.

“We’ve never had a bottle go this far – we’ve had them go closer to Martha’s Vineyard or Cape Cod, or Long Island, but never this far.”

In fact, one of the bottles made its way to the estate belonging to the late Jacqueline Onassis, in Martha’s Vineyard, which is another of her claims to fame.

Rory said that it is a distance of 3,000 miles between Nantucket and Friar Island, but it is more likely that the bottle travelled even further than that in its two year long journey.

“I imagine it’s been wandering in the mid-Atlantic for quite a while – bobbing around, having a little tour, a little exploration, all around the Atlantic. And, it very possibly passed over the wreck of the Titanic, which is really poignant for me,” he said.

Rory, who has was the first Irish diver to visit the Titanic site, is currently making arrangements to have the bottle sent back to Natalie, accompanied with a note of his own outlining all the details of where it was found, the latitude and longitude, and the whole story around it.