A blog about messages in bottles

[asakiyume]

With the help of Google Alerts, I keep my eye open for stories about messages in bottles, and when I find interesting ones, I add them, at least temporarily, to the messages-in-bottles page on the Pen Pal website. I've been thinking of setting alerts in more languages than just English, so I could broaden the countries I find results from, but even just in English, it's been interesting to see just how many stories come up.

The other day, what came up was the story of Clint Buffington, a guy who devotes himself not only to finding messages in bottles, but to tracking down the senders. He has a website where he chronicles his finds and adventures.


Clint Buffington with bottles he's found (picture source)

For example, in this entry, from last summer, he talks about being contacted by someone who found several messages--in German--in a bottle as it was floating to shore. How cool is that?!

On this page he contemplates the question of why people send messages in bottles, and he includes answers from people who've done it, annnnd . . .

. . . on this page he talks about the first message in a bottle he ever found--it was in the Caribbean, and with the message there were two US dollars.


"Plastic Beach," by Nick Robinson, on Flickr

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed by how many people *do* send messages in bottles--though really I shouldn't be. I think lots of us love leaving message for the world to find, and bottles are natural message holders.

I really hope I can find some stories from outside the anglophone world. So far there's just one at the messages-in-bottles page--a message in a bottle written in devanagari script.

I think people put prayers or messages of thanks in bottles too. I remember when I successfully transferred colleges, I tied a message of thanks to a tree--same idea.