Drop a line
Message in a bottle travels from Random Island, N.L., washes up on shore in Outer Hebrides, Scotland
There was a bit of wind and some tide when six-year-old Annalea Vardy dropped a bottle over the side of her grandfather’s boat near Pope’s Harbour on Canada Day, 2017.
Inside was a message, and a couple of pictures drawn by Annalea and her younger sister, Isabel, aged three.
They could only wonder where the bottle with its message would end up as they waved goodbye to it as it drifted away.
Their grandparents, David and Donna Vardy, didn’t think it would get far.
“I really thought it would crash on a beach somewhere around Bonavista,” says David, since that appeared to be the way the wind and tide was running that July 1.
The bottle did crash on a beach, but on a beach on a very distant shore.
In late May, Donna got a call from Scotland. The message in the bottle had been picked up by a hotel staff member on a beach in front of the Bara Beach Hotel, on the Isle of Barra, Outer Hebrides, Scotland.
The recovery of the bottle created quite a stir in Scotland.
“The newspaper over there, the Daily Record, even contacted the owner of the hotel,” says Donna, adding she was “over the moon” to learn the bottle had travelled so far.
From the Daily Record: Canadian message in a bottle sent by kids washes up 3,000km away on shore of Barra beach.
Although the Vardys spend a lot of time on the water, boating around Smith’s Sound and Random Sound, this was the first time they had ever put a message in a bottle and thrown it overboard. But with their first bottle travelling so far, and creating such a stir, it’s very likely they will write another note, stick it in a bottle and pitch it into the Atlantic Ocean to see where the wind and waves may take it.