Facebook user finds message in a bottle, ‘friends’ writer
Occasionally, message in a bottle stories make the news, but this one has a cute social media twist.
33 years after Olivier Vandevalle cast his message out to sea in a candle wax sealed wine bottle, Lorraine Yates found it in Dorset in Britain. While three decades passing would have, in the past, been a likely insurmountable amount of time to locate a message author (people move, die or otherwise become difficult to find), Yates turned to Facebook and friend requested Vandevalle. Vandevalle initially forgot the message he sent at the age of 14, but says that he soon remembered the bottle:
“…when you have not thought about the bottle for years and years suddenly this Englishwoman turns up from nowhere and has read your letter. When she e-mailed it to me it all came flooding back.’
The waiter added: ‘It was an incredible experience. Where has the bottle been all these years. Was it lying buried under a heap of sand until it was uncovered by a storm? I shall never know.”
Vandevalle says his two sons, 16 and 20, have since tried the message in a bottle experiment themselves:
‘But they were stupid enough not to write their address and consequently the chances of getting a reply are almost nil,’ their father added yesterday.
‘But the world is full of wonders, so you never know.’
