All at sea! A couple in Alaska had an amazing moment last month when they came upon a decades-old message in a bottle.
A woman named Mikki Stazel spoke to local newspapers and TV channels about the experience, explaining that she and her boyfriend Kevin Easley were walking with her dog on the beach when they found the bottle.
“We were both really excited,” Easley told the Port Townsend Leader. “So excited, that I didn’t want to wait to bring it home and use tweezers to remove the message. We decided to break the bottle on the log right there and then.”
In a video obtained by Seattle’s local Fox affiliate, Stazel is shown cracking the bottle open, chasing after the note as it blows in the wind. Once the two got ahold of the letter, they learned that it was dropped into the ocean off of the Washington coast in 1975, penned by a woman named Susan Cordell and her childhood friend. The two then looked up Cordell, reaching out to her about the long-lost note.
Cordell told Fox she received word from the couple reading, “Are you, by chance, Susan Cordell from Port Townsend, Washington? If so, I found a message in a bottle from you.”
“I had this flooding memory of doing it, actually, and so I immediately wrote back and said yes,” she added to Fox. “You know that stage when you’re that age and you just have this sense that the world is so big and you sort of want to be a part of it and have a sense of adventure… I think we just haphazardly wrote this quick letter, found a bottle, and just tossed it.”
Cordell, who grew up in the small Washington city but now lives as a scientist in Hawaii, told Q13 Fox just how stunned she was to hear about the message in a bottle making its way all the way to Alaska. The TV station reports that Cordell’s oceanographer friend “told her it’s quite possible the bottle traveled the ocean’s currents clockwise, circling from Hawaii over to China and Russia, finally resting on the shores of Alaska.”
“The fact that it didn’t break, and it landed on a soft beach, and you know, just the factors!” Cordell marveled. “I’m a scientist, so knowing the statistics that would be involved for something like this to happen is almost impossible… It makes it feel like anything is possible.”
