UPDATE: Frank and Judy identified.
Romantic. Mysterious. Intriguing.
That’s how a Nova Scotia woman describes a note tucked inside a bottle that’s been sitting on her parents’ porch for more than 16 years.
READ: Teen’s message in a bottle gets a reply – over 3 years and 5000 km later
Danita Sawler’s father, Robert Hirtle, found the bottle on the beach beside his cabin near Oak Island. Sawler isn’t exactly sure when he found it, but it was sometime before he passed away in December 2001 at the age of 77.
“He used to like walking along the beach,” she recalls. “The water would always bring stuff in.”
Sawler doesn’t believe her dad ever opened the bottle. Instead, he left it sitting on his porch in Martin’s Point, and that’s where it stayed until last March.
At that point, Sawler decided to bring the bottle in, but it sat on her desk for almost another year.
Curious about its contents, she finally decided a couple days ago to give the cork a try and remove the paper inside.
“I don’t know why it took me so long open it,” she said.
The note, written on a paper doily, is dated April 15, 2000.
It reads:
“Frank and Judy were wedd in the sight of God. If this is ever found please know that these two people are extremely happy in their faith and in each other.”
It’s unclear where the bottle came from, or whether Frank and Judy are in Nova Scotia. But Sawler has a message of her own for them, and is throwing it out, in case they’d like to get their bottle back.
“I have your bottle,” she said. “My dad found it and he didn’t get to read it.”
That’s why Sawler is on a mission to find the “newlyweds” and close a chapter for her father.
“It’s for him,” she said. “I’d like to find them for him because he’s the finder of the bottle.”
WATCH: World’s oldest message in a bottle found after 108 years
Sawler’s parents were married for nearly five decades, and she believes her father would have loved to have read the romantic note.
“I think he probably would have thought it was nice, that it was wonderful that these people were happy,” she said.