Fradam

Okay, maybe not quite a hundred billion.

But two in two weeks? It seems highly coincidental.. both the stories drifted across my nose in the past week.

Bottle #1

From: ~160km east of the Mississippi river delta, USA, in the 1960s
To: Pirates Beach (yaar!), Galveston, Texas, USA, mid-January 2009
Distance travelled: ~1000kms across ~45 years
Why: Drift bottles; experiment to learn about ocean currents and surface circulation.
Random: A group of school kids analysed the reasons how the bottle got there and suggested that perhaps Hurricane Ike had something to do with it.. and that it probably “went through sharks, fish, squid, octopus, coral, seaweed, shrimp, crabs, boats, dolphins, whales, seals, eels, sea turtles, nets, surfing and other things close to the top of the ocean”.

Bottle #2

From: Cooks Beach, NZ, 1984
To: Cooks Beach, NZ, 2008
Distance travelled: 0km, 24 years
Why: No particular reason, “just wanted to do it”
Random: The bottle owner was tracked down via the Old Friends website.

I’m sort of curious, what is more unusual? A bottle that goes everywhere, or one that goes nowhere?

Sending out an SOS… Now I want to go write a message in a bottle. Makes me wonder though, what would I put in there? Something which across the ages, could track me down (perhaps a library card; librarians can always track you down when you’ve got something overdue), and hopefully meaningful.. hmm. What would you put in there?