Message in a bottle becomes environmental lesson
It was three years ago when Daniel Holms was ready to sail through the blue Pacific waters to help transfer a sailboat.
Before hopping on board the Lorax en route to Palau, he brought his son Oliver, then 6, as an early birthday present.
Oliver had a request before they set sail.
“He asked me to drop a message for Santa Claus,” Holms says. “So we put it in a wine bottle and we dropped it off once we got to the deepest part. The message didn’t make it to Santa Claus but it came pretty close.”
Close was halfway to the North Pole, Holms says.
The crew of the Lorax drifted across the deepest part of the world, the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench. With calm seas and blue skies, Holms did as his son wished and dropped the bottle.
Nearly three years later, field biologist Sarah Youngren was combing the beaches of Midway Atoll when she spotted the mysterious green bottle.
Luckily, Youngren says, much of the cork was still intact.
“All the words in the message were still intact once we got the message out of the bottle,” she says.
The bottle was found on Feb. 20. Holms only left a mailing address on the message so Youngren did some Internet sleuthing, eventually finding him on Facebook.
Holms received the message from Youngren and initially didn’t believe it.
“I was surprised, for sure,” he says.
Midway is approximately 2,860 miles away from where the bottle was dropped into the ocean, Holms explains.
That got Holms, a Cub Scout den leader for Pack 23 on Naval Base Guam, thinking.
“Something as simple as a bottle getting thrown in the ocean, it goes somewhere,” he says. It doesn’t just disappear if it’s capped. It’s kind of neat to show how big the ocean is, but how small it really is. All that garbage is going to wash up somewhere.”
Holms plans to use his experience to teach his Cub Scouts about ocean trash and its effects as part of their “Leave No Trace” awards badge. He’ll be tapping on Youngren to help him with the lesson.