NETTING THE BIG ONE?
Scottish Skipper Finds Century-Old ‘Message In Bottle’
A SCOTTISH FISHERMAN HAS CAN LAY CLAIM TO A RARE CATCH: a 98-year-old message in a bottle burped up from the sea.
Skipper Andrew Leaper snared his treasure while fishing in April on a boat called Copius.
“As we hauled in the nets I spotted the bottle neck sticking out and I quickly grabbed it before it fell back in the sea,” the BBC reported Leaper saying. “It was very exciting to find the bottle and I couldn’t wait to open it.” A friend and colleague of Leaper is the previous record holder for a bottle found while fishing from the same Shetland-based boat in 2006. “It’s like winning the lottery twice,” Leaper exclaimed.
Alas, inside, there was no map to a secret treasure; no confession to a seafaring crime. Rather, there was the promise of a six pence to the finder if he mailed the enclosed post card noting the date and location of the discovery. According to Dr. Bill Turrell, Head of Marine Ecosystems with Marine Scotland Science: “Drift bottles gave oceanographers at the start of the last century important information that allowed them to create pictures of the patterns of water circulation in the seas around Scotland.”
The bottle was one of 1,890 dropped into the sea in June 1914 by a Captain C.H. Brown on behalf of the Fishery Board of Scotland.
All in all, the document’s a rather humdrum find. But the kicker is that it becomes the oldest recorded message in a bottle to ever be found, landing Leaper into the Guinness Book of Records.
Not a bad catch after all.
