Message in a bottle finds its way home to Grand Falls-windsor from Scotland
A little over 10 years ago, the Flood family gathered at Signal Hill in St. John’s to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of Joan and Raymond Flood.
With their children and grandchildren gathered around them, the couple watched balloons float up into the darkening sky, each of them – about 10 or 15 – trailing a bottle with a message in it.
Joan passed away soon after, followed by Raymond four years ago, but a piece of that magical night has recently returned to their family from an unlikely place.
“When I saw that, that day came right back to me,” Raymond Flood Jr., Raymond Sr.’s and Joan’s son, told The Advertiser after learning a bottle with a note from his mother had washed up on the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. “I felt shocked, got goosebumps. It’s amazing how it ended up where it did.”
Jon Macleod, of Bragar on the Isle of Lewis, was out for a Sunday walk with his girlfriend on a remote part of the island when he came across the bottle tucked under a large boulder near the sea.
“It is an area exposed to the full force of the Atlantic and the kind of place that’s good for beachcombing,” he wrote in an email to The Advertiser.
“We were really excited to find the message in the bottle — but didn’t open it until we got to a friend’s house. We all speculated on where it could be from, but no-one guessed Newfoundland.”
On stationary from Hillside Terrace Suites, Joan had written that she and Raymond were visiting St. John’s celebrating their 50th anniversary, and that whomever found the message should drop her a note. When Macleod tried to find the couple online, he came across news of their deaths.
“Reading the obituaries online, I felt more than a little sad to discover that Joan and Raymond had passed away,” he wrote. “It seemed such a contrast between the slow communication of the message in the bottle that took 11 years to cross the Atlantic and the super-fast communication of the internet that revealed that they were no longer living.
“It was a poignant moment and almost too much information to comprehend in a short amount of time.”
On this side of the ocean, Flood had his own strong reaction. Seeing his mother’s writing came as a shock and left him speechless.
“It didn’t look like it was weather beaten at all, like it had been written yesterday,” he said. “What are the odds? This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
Macleod habitually combs the beaches for flotsam and jetsam from afar, but this is the first time he has found a message in a bottle. In 2000, he recovered lobster-fishing gear with the name of a Maine fisherman on it, and, after finding an article about said fisherman in the local newspaper, got in touch with the man’s family. They have maintained a friendship ever since, with the granddaughter of the fisherman visiting Macleod in Edinburgh last year.
Flood said he would love to know more about where the message was found, and that his family had been considering a holiday in Ireland next year before this all came about.
“When we heard about the bottle, my daughter said, ‘So, when are we going to Scotland?’” he said.
Whether or not they do wind up meeting in person, the Floods and Macleod share a connection as a result of a message sent across the ocean in a bottle.
“It’s been great to be in touch with Raymond Flood Jr. to hear about his family and the 50th wedding anniversary launch of the bottle,” Macleod said. “The two sides of the story united, across the pond.”