8-year-old’s sweet message in a bottle found a decade later at Australian beach
An 8-year-old carefully wrote a message on a paper wrapper, placed it in a bottle and sent the bottle into the ocean. A decade later, the sweet message was rediscovered on a beach in Australia.
“I found a message in a bottle,” Rosalind Evans excitedly said in a Facebook video shared by Good Will Nurdle Hunting on April 11.
Evans was at a beach near Warrnambool volunteering with a cleanup group, according to the post. The volunteer group routinely collects plastic litter and other trash from the area’s beaches.
The volunteers routinely find plastic bottles and bottle caps scattered along the shore. But a message in a bottle? Not so much.
Evans brought the bottle back to the group and read the message, video shows.
“My name is Ines Zepcan,” the message said, “I am 8 years old, whoever finds this bottle will have good luck for life from me and my family.”
The volunteer group managed to find the now 18-year-old sender through Instagram, according to a post on April 14.
“My siblings and I sent that bottle off a pier in Portland, Victoria, exactly 10 years ago!” Zepcan told the group. By land, Portland is about 20 miles southwest of the Fitzroy River, where the bottle was found.
Zepcan told the group that the message in a bottle “has really brought back a lot of memories for me and my family.”
Zepcan also acknowledged that putting a plastic bottle in the ocean was “probably not the most environmentally friendly choice made by my eight year old self,” according to the volunteer group.
Plastic bottles “are one of the most common” types of marine debris, according to National Geographic. Because “plastics can take hundreds of years to break down,” plastic debris can end up all over the world, the outlet reported.
Warrnambool is about 160 miles southwest of Melbourne.
This story was originally published April 18, 2023 at 12:29 PM with the headline "8-year-old’s sweet message in a bottle found a decade later at Australian beach."
