MONTREAL – Eight years ago, a message in a bottle was placed into the St. Lawrence river in Quebec, Canada, by two 12-year-old girls.
After travelling 5,100 kilometres across the Atlantic ocean, it was discovered last week by Oisín Millea, a 9-year-old boy from Passage East, Waterford in the Irish Republic.
“On Wednesday night, we had really high tides in Passage East,” his mother, 31-year-old photographer Aoife Millea told Global News. “It was just washed up.”
She and her son had been wandering the beach – he was beach combing while she took photos – when Oisín happened upon the bottle.
You can listen to an interview with Oisín and his mother here:
They thought at first that the message, written in French, wrapped in a hair tie and put in a plastic Sprite bottle, had come from France.
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Intrigued because the letter was over eight years old, they took it home and with the help of Google Translate, Oisín and his mother discovered that it had come all the way from Canada.
The note had been thrown into the sea by two 12-year-old girls from Montreal.
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Charlaine Dalpé and Claudia Garneau were on holiday in the Gaspesie when, inspired by a television show, they decided to write a message, put it in a bottle and throw it in the St. Lawrence River, which is a gateway to the Atlantic Ocean.
The note reads in English:
06 July 2004
Hello,
We are two girls who had the idea to throw a bottle into the sea. We are called Charlaine and Claudia. We are both 12 years old and we live in Montreal. We are on vacation in the Gaspésie, in the village of Grande Vallée. We had the idea to launch a bottle because we saw a TV program about young people who threw a bottle in the sea. If you find this bottle, tell us when and how you found our bottle. Also tell us your name, age, country and where you live. Example: Paris, Miami, etc. To contact us write to us at: cheval-rouge95@hotmail.com. In closing, if you don’t have Internet, go to a friend’s house or to an Internet café as we are very curious to know if our bottle was found.
– Charlaine and Claudia
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Oisín was eager to track the two girls down but finding them was to prove a bit of a challenge as the email account was no longer active.
The two girls were discovered after a Montreal newspaper published the story with a note asking for anyone with information to get in touch.
A friend of one of the girls saw the story online – and the rest as they say, is history.
Charlaine and Claudia immediately remembered sending the note.
“It’s a bit unreal,” said Charlaine told The Gazette. “It’s really special, like something you see in the movies. You don’t expect something like this to happen for real.”
On Tuesday, the girls had an opportunity to meet Oisín via Skype.
“We saw them on Skype,” Oisín told Global News.
“They’re 20 now, they were only 12 when they launched the bottle.”
Tourism Ireland has confirmed that the organization will be flying the girls over to Ireland in the summer of 2013 – so they will have a chance to meet Oisín in person then.
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