Musicians have penned songs about it. Scientists have deployed them to study ocean currents. Those lost at sea or aboard a sinking ship have used them as a last-ditch effort to call for help.
In July 2016, a trio of Bay Area friends vacationing on Navini Island in Fiji placed a message in a bottle and set it out to sea wondering if a stranger would ever read their note.
After eight years they finally got an answer, all the way from Australia.
“It’s like every childhood sort of fantasy fairy tale sort of thing. Send a message away and someone actually reads it,” Sandra Lamari, who was among the group of hikers that found the bottle in Queensland, Australia, this month told KABC-TV in Los Angeles.
A group of hikers was cleaning up the beach along Chunda Bay when they stumbled upon a glass bottle containing a piece of paper carefully rolled and secured with a red hair tie. The message written on paper weathered from years drifting at sea was from Savannah, Kate and Janice of Sunnyvale.
“Dear reader,” the message begins. “We wrote this tonight because we heard so many stories about doing this. We’re leaving Navini today at 5:00 Fijian time so please write back…” It included an address on York Town Drive in Sunnyvale.
A video of the discovery posted on Instagram shows members of the Townsville Hike and Explore group gasping in surprise when they realized the authors were thousands of miles away in California. It’s unknown just how long the bottle had been drifting in the ocean or when it washed ashore. Chunda Bay is about 2,000 miles from Navini.
“We’re asking for all of your help to track Kate, Janice and Savannah down. Can you please share this post far and wide? We’d love to connect with them to let them know we found it,” the group wrote on Instagram.
It wasn’t long before news outlets in Australia and the United States began to share the story. Eventually, the Bay Area friends — Savannah Green, Janice Pierce and Kate Bonhan — discovered the post.
Green told Bay Area station KNTV-TV that she remembered writing the message on her first trip to Fiji when she was 11 years old and including the address of her childhood home in Sunnyvale.
“It kind of felt almost spiritual, like the way that it survived eight years and was still legible and my hair tie was still on the note,” she told the outlet.
The hikers and the three friends are hoping to meet in person soon.