Will Someone Find My Message in a Bottle?

Though we probably haven’t all done it, surely we’ve all at least thought about casting a message in a bottle out to sea. The idea, both romantic and questionable, has been played out in books and movies for decades. Sometimes the story ends with a shot of the bottle rolling onto a distant shore, leaving us to wonder if it will ever be found, and by whom. Other times the bottle finds its way into the hands of a surprised beachcomber who then pries it open to discover the message inside. A group of beach-cleaning hikers from Townsville, Australia, had the latter experience when they found a discarded bottle among the flotsam and jetsam littering the high-tide line.

“On our walk at Chunda Bay last night, the hikers were collecting rubbish when keen-eyed Jeff found a message in a bottle. It was very well sealed — the lid certainly was a challenge to get open,” the hikers wrote on their Facebook page Townsville Hike and Explore.

The note, rolled up and secured with a hair tie, opened with, “Dear Reader, we wrote this note because we heard so many stories about doing this.” Signed in July 2016 by Savannah, Kate, and Janice, it said the girls were leaving Fiji that morning, and asked the finder to please contact them at a Sunnyvale, California, address. Eight years later, they no longer lived at that address and the Townsville hikers reached out to news and social media platforms to try to find them.

The tactic worked, and the note, together with newspaper clippings of the find and photos of the hikers, was sent back to its authors, Savannah, Kate, and Janice.

Update:
After publishing this story we were reminded of the bottled notes created at the Farewell Party for Latitude managing editor Andy Turpin, now editor-at-large aboard his boat Little Wing. At the party we put farewell notes into the bottles and corked them up. Some took them along as they cruised off into the distance, some dropped them in the ebbing tide in S.F. Bay.

Has anyone found our messages in bottles?