Message received
Shelburne County boy finds bottle dropped in the ocean 18 years ago
A message in a bottle released into the Atlantic Ocean on Aug 19, 2000, off the shores of Massachusetts, was found earlier this month by 11-year-old Dallas Goreham.
Dallas was out scouring the Lower Woods Harbour shoreline near his home for sea glass and other ocean treasures when he came upon the bottle.
“Hi, Friend. I am a visitor to Gloucester. I hope you will let me know if and when you find this. Cheers, Rita,” read the note, which contained an email address.
“I was pretty stunned when I found it,” said Dallas, who wasn’t able to read the note because it was written in cursive, which isn’t taught in school anymore.
With the help of his mother Tara, Dallas sent an email to the address provided, but it bounced back.
“I did a Facebook search and couldn’t find anyone with that name, so I did a Google search and found an article written in 2003 in the Buffalo Times by the same name, so I emailed their news centre to see if they would send me her contact information,” said Tara.
An email address was provided and this time it worked. It didn’t long for Rita Ganim to reply.
“I had asked if she had visited Gloucester and had released a bottle in the ocean and she came back that night with, ‘yes.’ She remembered she had been visiting her daughter and it has kind of snowballed from there,” said Tara, as the story has made international headlines.
Dallas also sent Rita an email telling her about how he found the bottle and “how cool it was.”
“She thought it was really cool and she said I was expecting to find a pirate with no teeth but came upon a handsome little boy,” he said.
When contacted, Ganim said it was “shocking” to hear that the bottle had been found.
“Wonderfully shocking because I had totally forgot about that,” she said. “My goodness, 18 years ago I was visiting my daughter in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was a beautiful evening and my sonin-law Michael said let’s go for a little boat ride. He’s got this little Boston whaler and I was kind of sneaking the bottle on because I didn’t know if I should put in the water.
“I had the note written on fairly heavy paper and it was in an Ocean Spray bottle. I said to
Michael I don’t want to harm the environment. I don’t know if I want to do this and he said, ‘Oh Rita, go for it,’ so I threw it in the water,” she said. “Truthfully, I didn’t think much about it for 18 years. My only thought was I just kind of hope I don’t get a pirate with two teeth missing and a patch over his eye or something like that, but lucky for me we had Dallas, who at 11 years old and wasn’t even born yet, find my bottle, so it was shockingly wonderful. I’m still stunned by it.”
Ganim, 80, is a resident of West Seneca, a suburb of Buffalo.