Fort William boy finds message in a bottle cast by grieving family
A ten-year old Fort William made a surprise find after coming upon a decade-old message from a grieving family inside a bottle that had washed ashore, writes Jamie Wills.
Jordy Gordon, who was walking on Caol Spit with his mother, found the bottle on Wednesday April 26. Initially thinking the paper inside might be money, he was excited to show his mum his discovery.
Instead the string-tied note was a message from a family in Chippenham in England, who had lost a son in 2013, the same year Jordy was born.
The message read: “This message is in memory of Robbie Michael Day who sadly passed away 2/6/2013.”
It was signed by Robbie’s mother, Elaine, sister, Natasha, and girlfriend, Ella. Also included were Natasha’s contact details with a request that the bottle’s finder reach out to her.
Jordy’s mother, Shona Macgillivray, had initially thought her son had simply picked up some rubbish.
“I said: ‘Put that disgusting thing down’, but he said: ‘Look, there’s a message in it!’ It was very wet so we took it home to dry.”
Jordy insisted his mother contact the family, but the email address listed on the message was no longer in use. A Facebook search brought up an overwhelming number of people with Natasha’s name.
However a friend did some detective work and found a newspaper article from when Mr Day, 35, had passed, and Shona was eventually able to contact the family via a Chippenham noticeboard on Facebook.
The family responded to thank Shona and Jordy for finding the bottle, and said this was the last of those they had cast adrift to be found. The timing was also poignant as Mr Day’s birthday was in May.
Other bottles that Mr Day’s family had sent were found in Cornwall, Portsmouth, in both Brittany and Normandy in France, and by a lifeboat crew off the Isle of Wight.
At the time of sending the bottles, Ms Barron had said of her son: “He always wanted to travel, so now he is travelling. We wanted people to know who he was, because he was very special to us.”