New Jersey family finds message in a bottle purportedly sent from Ireland in 2019
A family cleaning up a beach in Wildwood, New Jersey, found a message in a bottle that contended it left Ireland in 2019.
Frank Bolger, his wife, Karen, and their granddaughter Autumn were doing their duty on the 14th Street beach when they spotted glass gleaming from a tangle of seaweed. Inside the vessel was a message from across the Atlantic Ocean.
“We found the bottle in some seaweed right at the water’s edge,” Mr. Bolger told IrishCentral.com on Tuesday.
After going home to extract the paper note, the Bolgers read the message sent by Aoife, who did not provide a surname or contact information in the trans-Atlantic correspondence.
The Bolgers sent pictures of the message and bottle to Wildwood Sun by the Sea Magazine, which posted them on Facebook.
“I have thrown this bottle into the sea for someone to find another day. Maybe it’s traveled down to Africa or to Iceland! I won’t know if someone found this, but I hope it is found!” Aoife wrote, with the SOS dated July 17, 2019.
Mr. Bolger told IrishCentral that the bottle’s ultimate destination was fitting, as Wildwood has a large Irish-American population.
He hopes to find Aoife to communicate how far the message traveled.
“I think she was somebody at the beach, in her 30s, romantic I guess, and threw it in the ocean,” Mr. Bolger hypothesized to Irish public radio broadcaster Raidio Teilifis Eireann Thursday.
