Message-in-a-Bottle Hunter Finds West Coast Sailor’s Message

Clint Buffington from Utah is a musician. He’s also a beachcomber who dedicates a good chunk of his time to finding and reuniting messages in bottles with their authors. Buffington has found so many bottles over the years that he’s set up an entire website and online message-in-a-bottle museum. One of his most recent finds has resulted in a connection with Menlo Park man Tom Welch.

Tom Welch was sailing from the Canary Islands to Saint Martin in 2015 aboard the 66-ft catamaran FLASH. Seven days into the voyage, Welch wrote his message and cast it into the sea inside a green bottle. He was 17. The message included an email address for the finder to contact Welch and let him know where the bottle turned up. When Buffington found the bottle in February this year, he thought it could have circled the North Atlantic a couple of times before it was found on a beach in the British West Indies, near Bahama. He told KTVU in an email, “Usually, when a message in a bottle looks this good, we call it ‘young,’ as in, ‘no way has that been floating around very long.’” The message inside was also in good condition, which Buffington attributes to the champagne cork and wire cage used to seal the bottle.

Buffington found his first message in a bottle in 2007 during a Caribbean trip with his father. Since then he has found scores of bottled messages that had been cast into the ocean. A look through his online museum gives an idea of the time frames and travel paths of the bottles and their originators. But aside from the mystery and romance of the storied “message in a bottle,” Buffington shares some history about the origins of casting bottles into the sea. He says bottles were cast adrift in the name of science, that in the early years of ocean science, “[B]ottled letters were the best available means to study ocean currents.” Buffington also says some of the first bottled messages were sent in the 18th and 19th centuries and are still being found today.

But let’s get back to the romance. Who hasn’t imagined picking up a bottle on the beach and finding a message from long, long ago and far, far away? This writer certainly has.

We want to hear from you, dear readers: Who has thrown a message in a bottle overboard while on a voyage to or from somewhere? What was your motivation? What did the note say? And has anyone ever contacted you to say they found it? Or, have you ever found a message in a bottle?

Let us know in the comments below, or email us at [email protected].