The idea of sending a message in a bottle is more of an expression than anything people actually do in today’s era of instant communication. But one 11-year-old girl from Michigan had the incredibly good fortune of stumbling across a real-life handwritten message in a bottle while she was vacationing in Florida with her family.
Josie Law was walking on the beach on Anna Maria Island when she saw something washing up on shore. “The wave went like a crash into each other and went back, so then I grabbed it really quickly and I showed my mom,” Josie said.
The bottle was from 2018.
Initially, Josie thought the object was just a piece of trash, WTSP reported. But as she examined it more closely, she saw it was a glass bottle with a note inside. The note contained the date August 17, 2018. There was an origami figure and a note reading, “Hello, people who found this. You will be happy that you found this. Why? Because you will know me with this number.”
Josie’s mom, Paris Hoisington, contacted the number out of curiosity. “I popped it into my phone and decided to text,” Hoisington said. “I didn’t really want to call, but they texted me back.”
They learned that a woman in Hawaii put that note in the ocean off the coast of Oahu with her younger brother. She was 13 and he was 8 at the time.
‘It was super fun to see that our bottle ended up all the way in Florida,’ the author of the note said.
The woman, who asked not to be identified, texted back, “It was something fun we did because we found a message in a bottle before we had decided to make our own in 2018,” she wrote. “It was super fun to see that our bottle ended up all the way in Florida and that they ended up reaching out to us. Definitely did not expect that to happen.”
The story went viral when it made its way to Facebook. While many were intrigued, there were some who dismissed the whole thing as a hoax, given the bottle’s journey across oceans. Some pointed to the fact that the Hawaiian woman’s brother is a competitive surfer and may have carried the note to the East Coast. To evaluate the logistics of the bottle’s journey, WTSP tapped Chief Meteorologist Bobby Deskins for an explanation.
A meteorologist explained the bottle’s possible journey.
“It is technically possible,” Deskins said. “It would generally have to go north out of Hawaii to get into this current, come back down the West Coast of the United States, crossover, and head over through the Philippines and then over towards the southwest coast of South America. Go underneath South America and then up along this current on the West Coast of Africa up into the intertropical convergence zone where our hurricanes sometimes come from and then back up through the Caribbean by the Bahamas and up towards Anna Maria Island,” he explained.
‘It keeps them interested in learning,’ Josie’s mom said.
Whether the bottle took this path or not, the sense of joy and wonder it sparked for Josie is real. “This right here, the whole mystery and the whole adventure — it’s very cool for kids,” she said. “They want to learn about it. It keeps them interested in learning.”
Despite the magic, the woman in Hawaii is advising others not to replicate this exercise. “Being 21 and 13 now, we do not want to encourage others to do this because it is littering and illegal!” she said. “We did not know this at the time, as we were young kids and copying something that someone else had done before us. I pray God blesses all those who hear this story.”
