Free Republic

A message in a bottle that was thrown into the ocean in 1913 and recently found by a fisherman off the coast of Germany was returned to the sender's granddaughter. "It was very surprising," said Angela Erdmann, 62, to The Guardian. "A man stood in front of my door and told me he had post from my grandfather. He then told me that a message in a bottle was found and that the name that was on the card was that of my grandfather."

A Scottish skipper has found the oldest message ever in a bottle at sea, Guinness World Records said. According to the record-keeping organization, Andrew Leaper, skipper of the Shetland fishing boat "Copious," made the discovery on April 12 when hauling in his nets in the North Sea off the coast of Shetland. He later learned that the message in bottle had been adrift for 97 years and 309 days. This surpasses the previous record by more than five years. Amazingly, it was Leaper's friend Mark Anderson who set the previous record in 2006 by retrieving another Scottish bottle as he...

A bottle note made it all the way to France and was returned this week You ever wonder what would happen if you just tossed a note in the ocean and see what happened? Well, it might shock you, but eventually someone will find it, albeit decades later. A message in a bottle tossed into the Atlantic Ocean by a young Florida camper during a 1987 field trip was returned this week, some 23 years after it was cast away. Judy Kissel, an early childhood and camp director at the Soref Jewish Community Center in Plantation, says the note was...

Evan Buffington knew what he had found as soon as he spotted it in the sand. The bottle was imbedded in a small island no more than 48 square miles called Middle Caicos, part of the British West Indies. Buffington found it while vacationing with his family in late August, on a hike with the men of the family. Buffington, a resident of Makanda, Ill., dug out the bottle and brushed off the sand. It was a clear glass Tab cola bottle, with a cork inside and an aluminum screw top to keep it sealed. Some moisture had seeped in,...

Maggie Holbrook always thought it strange that the still waters of White Lake and not the flowing current of the nearby Wolf River was the vessel used to conceal the time capsules of area school children. That was until one of those little messages in a bottle floated back to the surface. A note, cloaked inside an empty vanilla container and freed of the weight that had held it to the bottom, will soon take a spot on Holbrook's wall after washing up on shore early this spring. Eleven years ago it was written by her son, Joshua Baker, and...

A sailor who sent a message out to sea in a bottle says he received a reply from England - accusing him of littering. 'I kind of felt like no good deed goes unpunished,' Harvey Bennett, 55, told the East Hampton Star. The plastic bottle was one of five that Bennett placed in the ocean off Long Island in August. Last week, he excitedly opened a letter from England, and was stunned by the reply: 'I recently found your bottle while taking a scenic walk on the beach by Poole Harbour. While you may consider this some profound experiment on...

San Jose, May 30 (EFE).- Eighty-eight castaways adrift for nine days at sea after immigrant smugglers abandoned them to their fate were rescued on the weekend off Costa Rica's Pacific coast after a fisherman pulled from the ocean a bottle containing a desperate message for help written by one of the group. Marviva organization director Francisco Estrada told EFE that the group consisted of 48 Ecuadorians and 40 Peruvians, adding that 18 of them were women and the rest were men of assorted ages. The rescue was made Sunday morning in a joint operation by Costa Rican authorities and...