Marianne Winkler was walking a beach in her German homeland when she came across a bottle with a clear instruction to “Break the Bottle.”
Her husband Horst tried to extract the contents without breaking the glass, but eventually they had to do so to read what was written on the post card inside.
Turns out it was from the Marine Biological Association of Plymouth, England and had been in the ocean for 108 years.
Guinness World Records considers it the oldest message in a bottle ever found.
With my luck, I’d break the bottle and find that the message reads:
Drink More Ovaltine
A crummy commercial …
izlamo delenda est …
I wonder how much it would have been worth if they hadn’t broken it open? They only got a shilling from the MBA.
I found on one winter day after a nor’easter, a mason jar, sealed with a note and what looked like silk roses. I got it home, opened and found that it was only 2 days old and from 2 miles down the beach. Fresh red roses and a note to a recently lost mother. I carefully repacked sealed it much better and returned to the ocean the next day on a falling tide.
I never find the cool stuff.
I found a US Quarter on the beach the other day.
It was 2001 Rhode Island from the Statehood Series.
It had barnacles and was sandblasted pretty good.
Looking at it from the side it shows the copper center is separating from the nickel outer layers.
No telling how long it had been in the Gulf of Mexico?
I kept it for good luck.
The note inside reads “Nice job, dumbass… You’ve just released the Andromeda Strain”.
When I was 5 we visited the beach in NC and my mother gave me my little brother’s shitty diaper to rinse out in the ocean. I threw it as far as I could and told my mother that a whale had eaten it.
She didn’t believe me …
Whipped my ass twice – once for throwing the diaper away and again for lying.
I still maintain that a whale ate it.
My lie – I’m stickin with it.
izlamo delenda est …
@Menderman: So what’s not cool about flowers and a farewell message to Mom?
@Tim: So YOU’RE the one responsible for what happened to Shamu! Greenpeace is still looking for you, fella…
?
It could have been the Black Plague virus
I broke a very rare bottle?
Every year on my kids birthday I’d get her helium balloons and have all of us, her little party guests and I, tie a wish to the end of our balloon and let it go. I’m still waiting for mine…a mute pianist with a really big heart. Yes, a kind hearted man. That’s what I was going to say.
Actually the note said “Don’t let those moslem assholes in!!” But of course, it was censored.
Menderman the stuff inside may not have been especially cool, but what you did with it was.
Fwiw
I found a horseshoe crab shell near Kill Devil Hills NC.
A few days later I left it at Monarch Pass CO.
In the bushes near a picnic table, not quite out of sight…
Back in 1963 my buddy Pete and I put a clipping from an Italian Newspaper about the murder of JFK in a sealed wine bottle along with our names and New York addresses, and dropped it into the Po River near the Adriatic Sea.
We haven’t heard from anyone….. yet.
BTW. Nice gesture Menderman.
The bottle contained votes for Clinton. There will be millions of such bottles “discovered” soon.