All manner of things wash ashore in our home waters – the rugged coastline of British Columbia and neighbouring Southeast Alaska – borne by currents and winds from as far away as Japan and the Philippines. Since 2007, there have been at least twenty detached human feet; there have been container-loads of running shoes (but just try finding a matching pair…), and a few of those famous 29,000 Friendly Floatees (yellow rubber ducks) that fell off a ship in 1992 and that have come to enhance scientists’ knowledge of ocean currents. There was a Soviet sonar buoy used for tracking American “boomers” (nuclear-armed submarines) in Cold War days as they transited the Strait of Juan de Fuca and – more recently – a Harley Davidson motorbike that was a victim of the Fukushima tsunami.
But you seem rarely to hear of that item of jetsam that every beachcomber hopes one day to find, a trope featured in a 1979 rock song by The Police and in countless novels and movies (most recently a particularly bad one starring Kevin Costner): a Message in a Bottle.
Sailing around the world in the eighties in our little Albin Vega 27, Tarka The Otter, Jenny and I decided we would to give scavengers all over the world a treat by casting our own messages overboard at random locations. Usually, we remembered to record these events. The entry in Tarka’s log for Saturday October 25th 1986, made two days out from Suva (Fiji) en route to Brisbane (Australia) and after we had taken our evening sun-sight, reads:
“The wind moderated to Force 4 from the East; we averaged slightly over 4 knots. At 20 degrees 41 minutes South, 174 degrees 01 minute East, the Captain put a message in the Chivas Regal bottle…”
We were moderately disappointed but not really surprised when we never heard back from these sporadic attempts. Over the years, as it dawned on us that perhaps the ocean already had enough debris floating around, we ended the practise. But whenever we spent an hour or two taking exercise on some windward beach, I always kept an eye open for the glint of a glass bottle and – hopefully – a piece of paper inside.
Then in 2018 came an e-mail from a lady called Cathy Head, who lives in Queensland, Australia. By the miracle of Google she had traced the former owners of Tarka the Otter and had an interesting tale to tell.
While Cathy was recently helping her 106-year-old grandmother Eileen move into an assisted-living facility, Eileen had pulled out an old scrapbook and told her the story of how one day, walking along McEwan’s beach, near Mackay, she had found a glass bottle with a message inside it. The date was September 4th 1987. In under a year our bottle had drifted some 1650 nm, washing over or dodging countless reefs around New Caledonia, and even surmounting the Great Barrier Reef
The message was soggy and barely legible, but Eileen could make out the name of its senders and the name of the sailing vessel; the suggested contact details were not readable. Eileen had tried in vain to find us, going so far as to write to “Mr Coghlan, C/- The Canadian Sailing Yacht Club, “Tarka the Otter”, Canada”, but (unsurprisingly, perhaps) the letter was returned to her.
map of McEwan’s Beach
(MacKay,Queensland)
When we received Cathy’s e-mail, we wrote back immediately; Eileen was just as thrilled as we were. A little later, Cathy wrote to tell us that her grandmother had died in April 2019, just a few weeks short of her 107th birthday. She added:
“I am so pleased I was able to make contact with you all late last year and (Eileen) was able to enjoy the knowledge that her efforts from all those years ago had eventually paid off. I couldn’t wipe the smile from her face when she read your messages.”
More: Then and Now