Ann and Roy Huntley have always wanted to find a message in a bottle on their beloved Ocracoke seashore, so when their dream came true last month, it was even sweeter to learn the message was from P.E.I. – a fondly remembered vacation destination from their younger days.
The beach is regularly pecked clean by “shellers” who collect the ocean’s treasures, so when the couple came across it, they knew it hadn’t been in the sand for long.
“Oh my gosh, this is a note in a bottle,” said Roy. “This is my dream. I’m gonna go save somebody on a desert island or something.”
Ann was equally enthused.
“We’ve combed the beach all our lives looking for a message in a bottle and we finally found one,” she said.
The Huntleys, who spend their down time on Ocracoke Island, a part of the Outer Banks that sits below Cape Hatteras off the shore of North Carolina, didn’t open it right away. Instead, they decided to wait for friends who were coming to dinner and share the find with them.
But it wasn’t smooth sailing at the dinner table.
The green bottle was intact, complete with an aluminum screw cap that was sealing in some rolled up paper.
“I couldn’t get the note out, so I had to bust the bottle up,” said Roy.
Once inside, they saw moisture had erased some of the words on the paper.
“I guess about 75 per cent of the note was illegible,” he said.
Undeterred, they tried to decipher the words, which although smudged or missing were clearly a name and address.
The dinner party was able to make out “P.E.I.” and “anada” which steered them north.
Another line of the address started with “Br” and ended with “t”.
The clear green glass bottle has an aluminum screw cap and would have held around eight ounces, Roy figured.
“I would say a vinegar bottle,” said Ann. “It wasn’t a wine bottle.”
Roy and Ann knew P.E.I. was small from their trip to the Island in 1986 when they’d had a great time camping in a Volkswagen van.
“We figured there weren’t that many towns on Prince Edward Island that started with ‘Br’,” said Roy.
Ann was the one to come up with the idea to get in touch with the media on the Island, he said, since the couple is hoping to discover who sent the bottle and when.
“There’s somebody up there who’s wondering what happened to their note, I’ll bet,” said Roy.
Ocracoke is more than 2,000 kilometres from P.E.I., and the bottle would have had to travel through complicated ocean currents to make it to the Huntley’s beach.
“The Labrador Current comes down to Cape Hatteras and then it heads back north. And Ocracoke, we have the Gulf Stream and the water is much warmer there than when you swim at Cape Hatteras, so it’s kind of cool that this bottle made the turn and landed on the beach south,” said Ann. “It’s been on a journey.”
Getting in touch
- If you think it was your bottle that the Huntleys found on the beach in North Carolina, contact [email protected], and she will put you in touch with the couple.
Alison Jenkins is a local journalism initiative reporter, a position funded by the federal government.
