Message in Bottle Found, 25 Years Hence

March 11, 2009 at 6:36 pm | Posted in News | 1 Comment

 

Those New Zealand beaches are disgorging treasures galore. First it was a relic from a sunken sailing ship, found recently by a Taranaki beachcomber. Now it’s a message in a bottle that was returned to its writer this week, 25 years after she chucked it into the sea. Last Christmas Day, eight-year-old Aucklander Tom Hussona discovered the artifact on yet another North Island strand, Cooks Beach. “The message was just in hundreds of bits,” Tom’s mother Erica told a reporter. “The paper was so delicate … we had to try to get between the folds and unravel it with toothpicks.” Assembling the message, they saw that it had been written by a girl exactly the same age as Tom — but she had written it 25 years ago. 

With the help of the Internet, this week Tom and Erica located the message-writer, Kylie Tatham-Tahere, who is now a grown woman, married with three children. (They texted her — talk about the opposite end of the communication spectrum from messages in bottles!) During a childhood vacation a quarter-century ago, Tatham-Tahere and a cousin threw the bottle into the sea while boating just offshore from Cooks Beach.

The families are planning a joint vacation where they can all meet … at the beach.