MONTREALERS WILL FOLLOW THEIR BOTTLE TO IRELAND
Will be heading to Ireland as the country’s tourism agency agrees to pick up the tab
“C’EST NOUS!” Claudia Garneau and Charlaine Dalpé (right) are media darlings after coming forward as the mystery girls described in a Gazette story about a boy in Ireland who found a message in a bottle sent from Quebec dating back to 2004. The “girls,” now 20, have accepted an offer from Tourism Ireland to travel there to meet the boy
Amessage 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 and in CEGEP, were particularly surprised because when they threw it in to the waters of the St. Lawrence River outside the Gaspésie town of Grande Vallée, 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, located on 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, red-haired 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 Vallée. … 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 Vallée to Passage East, roughly 4,000 kilometres apart as the crow flies. But Charlaine and Claudia couldn’t be found.
The 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 Dalpé saw the story online and contacted her on Facebook Monday evening.
“I’m curious’” he said. “Could this be you?”
By Monday night, Dalpé 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 Dalpé 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.
“It was great,” Oisin said Tuesday of his chat with the girls. “That was the whole point, talking to the people who threw it in.”
The phone hasn’t stopped ringing and the battery in the cell is almost dead, prompt- ing his mother to joke: “If you find another bottle with a note, throw it back.”
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 year-long celebration of all things Irish.
The “girls” — Dalpé is studying interior design at CEGEP, Gaudreau is studying nuclear medicine — accepted the offer. They hadn’t thought of the bottle tossed on a whim for a long time, but recognized the note as soon as they saw the pictures.
“It’s really special,” Dalpé said. “It’s something you see in a movie, but you don’t think that can happen for real. Especially when you send it into the sea, and it keeps coming back.
“And that it was a child who found it, close to the age we were when we sent it. It’s like a dream.”
Tuesday evening, Ireland time, Oisin was taking a break from the barrage of media interviews to play with Legos, but made time for The Gazette.
The bottle was in good shape when he found it, he said, but the cap was hard to take off because there was sand caught in it — it took about a minute to wrestle open. The note was pristine, apart from a bit of rust that had leaked off the metal part of the hair elastic.
What were his first thoughts when he made the discovery?
“I thought: ‘I’m going to be famous.’ ”