Montreal girls’ bottle message brings fame
A message sealed in a green plastic bottle and cast into the sea by two Montreal girls eight years ago has brought them fame and a free trip to an emerald isle.
The girls, now 20, were particularly surprised because when they threw it into the waters of the St. Lawrence River outside the Quebec town of Grande Vallee, the tide kept bringing it back. Then it got caught in the rocks.
“Maybe it will get free eventually,” Claudia Garneau said she thought at the time. “But we didn’t think it would get all the way there.”
The two-litre 7Up bottle washed up last week in the town of Passage East at the southern tip of Ireland, where the River Suir flows into the Celtic Sea and the tides bring the ocean waters into the harbour.
The tides were “super high” last Wednesday, washing the ocean’s detritus of trees and driftwood and plastic pop bottles up around the houses of the town’s 800 residents. Nine-year-old Oisin Millea, redhaired and cherub-faced, did as he often does, and started prospecting for bounty the next day. He picked up the bottle, thinking there was something beneath it, and saw the note inside, wrapped in a hair elastic. “He’s always searching for bits of treasure,” said his mother, Aoife Millea. “And that was treasure for him.”
“06/2004,” said the handwritten note, in French. “Hello, we are two girls who had the idea to launch a bottle into the sea. We are called Charlaine and Claudia. We are both 12 and we live in Montreal. We are on vacation in the Gaspésie, in the village of Grande Vallee. … If you find our bottle, tell us when and how you found our bottle.”
They included an email address, but it was no longer in service. Their message had bobbed for untold miles on its eight-year passage from Grande Vallee to Passage East, roughly 4,000 kilometres apart as the crow flies. But Charlaine and Claudia couldn’t be found.
The Montreal Gazette carried a story about Oisin’s find written by Noel Baker of the Irish Examiner in its Monday online edition with a note asking for anyone with information about Charlaine and Claudia to please get in touch. An anglophone friend of Charlaine Dalpe saw the story online and contacted her on Facebook Monday evening.
By Monday night, Dalpe and Garneau, who are still friends, had written to The Gazette to say “c’est nous,” which the paper noted online. Requests from Irish media for contact information for the two girls started coming in just before 5 a.m. On Tuesday, they were speaking to Irish radio, national television broadcaster RTE and several newspapers. RTE set up a Skype hook-up so they could tape Dalpe and Garneau, in Montreal, speaking face-to-face with Oisin, in Ireland. The BBC carried the story. So did the CBC and the Toronto Star.
Tourism Ireland picked up the story, and Tuesday afternoon told the girls they would cover the airfare and hotels for a one-week trip to Ireland to see their bottle again, and as part of its Gathering Ireland 2013 festivities, a yearlong celebration of all things Irish.