Musicians have written songs about it. Scientists have deployed them to study ocean currents. Those lost at sea or on board 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 released it into the ocean, 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 kind of fantasy story. Send a message and someone actually reads it,” Sandra Lamari, who was one of the hikers who found the bottle in Queensland, Australia, told KABC-TV this month in Los Angeles.
A group of hikers were cleaning up the beach along Chunda Bay when they stumbled upon a glass bottle containing a paper carefully rolled up and secured with a red hair tie. The message, written on paper weathered after years of drifting at sea, came 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 a.m. Fijian time, so please write back…” It included an address on York Town Drive in Sunnyvale.
A video of the discovery published 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 is unknown how long the bottle had been drifting in the ocean or when it washed ashore. Chunda Bay is about 3,000 miles from Navini.
“We are asking for all your help tracking down Kate, Janice and Savannah. Can you please share this post far and wide? We would love to connect with them to let them know we found it,” the group wrote on Instagram.
It wasn’t long before news agencies in Australia and the US began sharing 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 and included the address of her childhood home in Sunnyvale.
“It felt almost spiritual, like 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 hope to meet in person soon.