A message in a bottle thrown into the sea nearly 40 years ago that brought joy to the boy who found it has been tinged with sadness after its authors were located.
Meg Prideaux took her four-year-old son Leo to the beach in her hometown of Lancelin, Western Australia, to hunt for treasure when they found a bottle with a rolled-up note inside buried in the sand.
“We brought it home and waited for my daughter and husband to come home, but we couldn’t open it,” Ms. Prideaux said. Seven news.
The message was difficult to remove from the bottle due to corrosion on the wax seal and barnacles growing on it.
Mrs. Prideaux’s husband managed to break the seal with a knife, carefully removed the note and unrolled it.
It was a little damp but clearly legible and dated 1985, 39 years ago.
The note had been written by Joanne Hunter and Louise Pocock, who were both 15 years old at the time.
But the note had not travelled very far: it had been thrown into the sea on the same beach where it was found almost four decades later.
Four-year-old Leo (pictured) found a bottle with a rolled-up note inside while searching for treasure on Tuesday.
The teenagers were holidaying at Ms Hunter’s family beach house in Lancelin, about two hours north of Perth, when they decided to write a message in a bottle.
The note requested that whoever found it send a letter to the girls in Perth.
The girls expected it to end up thousands of miles away in some exotic, faraway land.
The note only returned to Lancelin Beach, where it lay buried for nearly 40 years.
Seven news stories helped put the family in touch with Joanne Evans (née Hunter), 54.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, is that really what happened?’ I haven’t thought about that in a long time,” Evans said.
‘We wrote it at night and sealed it with wax and then swam it out into the water because, at first, we threw it from the beach and it kept coming back into the water, so we swam out the next morning.’
She said her friend Louise “was always full of excitement and had a big imagination, it was her idea to do it.”
Tragically, Mrs Pocock died of leukaemia six years ago.
But her sister Sarah said she would have been delighted to know the message had been found.
“Oh, she would be so happy, she really would be, especially as a little boy found it after 39 years sitting in the sand,” Sarah said.
Both of the letter writers were 15 years old at the time. Pictured is Joanne Evans (née Hunter)
The message (pictured) was a little damp but clearly legible and dated 1985, 39 years ago.
Tragically, Ms Pocock (pictured) died of leukaemia six years ago, but her sister, Sarah Martin, said she would have been delighted the message had been found.
‘She was a great, fun, carefree person and did very well in life, very artistic and creative, and she met a wonderful man and married him and had a beautiful little girl.
“As time goes by, you feel like they’re moving further and further away from you and suddenly this message is this wonderful thing that comes out of nowhere.”
The Prideaux family now plans to catch up with Mrs. Evans to deliver the bottle and the precious note.
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