Alaskan woman’s bid to solve bottle riddle
THE granddaughter of an Alaskan man who discovered a message in a bottle written 55 years ago is trying to find the family of the man who wrote it.
John Fricker, from Inchicore in Dublin, placed a letter in a bottle and threw it into the Pacific in 1963.
Michael Perensovich discovered the bottle on the shores of Alaska a year later.
Mr Fricker sadly passed away five years ago but Mr Perensovich’s granddaughter, Kari, has come to Ireland in the hope of finding his family.
The message, which read, ‘Finder please write John J. Fricker, 215 Sarsfield Road, Inchicore, Dublin 8. Dropped into the Mid-Pacific Ocean April 7th 1963. From M/V Irish Rowan’ was discovered by Mr Perensovich in the Yakutat region north of the city of Junwau in Alaska in the winter of 1964. Mr Fricker was a cook on the Irish merchant ship, the M/V Irish Rowan, at the time. The bottle floated 6,000km from the mid-Pacific to Alaska. Mr Perensovich, a wildlife biologist, had been sent out on a field exhibition to record the number of moose in the region when he discovered the bottle buried in the sand.
He wrote several times to Mr Fricker over the years but he never got a reply. Now, Ms Perensovich is in the country hoping to find his brothers or sisters.
‘Everyone’s heard the story a million times so I was like, why hasn’t anybody tried this?
‘I’m the first one to follow it up. It sits on the mantle in his house and he sees it every day.
‘It would mean the world to him if we could find the family,’ Ms Perensovich told the Irish Times.
Mr Fricker lived at 215 Sarsfield Road in Inchicore until he died in April 15, 2013. He has four sisters and two brothers, whom Ms Perensovich hopes to track down.