LOST AT SEA

42-Year-Old Message in a Bottle Washes Up on Remote Island

The letter was written in 1983 and placed in a gin bottle along with an outdated $2 bill.

A beachgoer got a peculiar surprise when he discovered a message in a bottle washed up on the shores of a remote Canadian island. Mark Doucette, an archaeology technician from Potlotek First Nation, stumbled upon the oddity while strolling Sable Island National Park Reserve, a crescent-shaped strip of sand off Nova Scotia. The four-decade-old letter was dated Jan. 14, 1983, and came from a resupply ship operating near the island. In faded wording, the letter vaguely noted that it was from the crew of a boat called the Wimpey Sea Hunter. There were also a few crew names on the back of the paper, but park representatives have not yet been able to track any of them down. The paper was still damp from its long journey inside a bottle, and it accompanied a Canadian $2 bill from 1974. The bill, which featured a portrait of young Queen Elizabeth, was replaced with the $2 coin, dubbed the Toonie, in 1996. “Some of our Sable team had never seen a two-dollar bill before,” said Jennifer Nicholson, a representative from Parks Canada. She added that one message in a bottle is usually found in Nova Scotia every year. Most are from the 1980s, but some date back to as early as a century ago. The May 23 find also came with another shock: “You could still smell the gin!” Nicholson said. ”Even 40 years later, that hadn’t faded.”