It is amazing when you go fishing what you can find.......
Have you ever caught or found washed up a message in a bottle?
A message in a bottle is a form of communication whereby a message is sealed in a container (archetypically a glass bottle, but could be any medium, so long as it floats and remains waterproof) and released into the sea or ocean. Among other purposes they are used for scientific studies of ocean currents.
Some intresting facts to read whilst you wait for that bite
The first recorded messages in bottles were released around 310 BC by the Ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus, as part of an experiment to show that the Mediterranean Sea was formed by the inflowing Atlantic Ocean.
On his return to Spain following his first voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus's ship entered a severe storm. Columbus is said to have thrown a report of his discovery along with a note asking it to be passed on to the Queen of Castile, in a sealed cask into the sea, hoping the news would make it back even if he did not survive. Columbus did survive and the sealed report was never found, or, at least, its discovery never reported.
In the 16th century, the English navy, among others, used bottle messages to send ashore information about enemy positions. Queen Elizabeth I created an official position of "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles", and anyone else opening the bottles could face the death penalty.Don't worry this law is no longer in place..... I hope..... to be safe check for Royal Guards first ;)
In 1784 Chunosuke Matsuyama sent a message detailing his and 43 shipmates' shipwrecking in a bottle that washed ashore and was found by a Japanese seaweed collector in 1935, in the village of Hiraturemura, the birthplace of Chunosuke Matsuyama.
Since 1876, people have often used messages adrift in containers to communicate from the remote Scottish island of St Kilda.
In 1914, British World War I soldier Private Thomas Hughes tossed a green ginger beer bottle containing a letter to his wife into the English Channel. He was killed two days later fighting in France. In 1999, fisherman Steve Gowan dredged up the bottle in the River Thames. Although the intended recipient of the letter had died in 1979, it was delivered in 1999 to Private Hughes' 86-year old daughter living in New Zealand.
On June 10, 1914, a scientist from the Glasgow (Scotland) School of Navigation cast 1,890 bottles into the ocean to test undercurrents in the seas around Scotland. One of those bottles was recovered in 2012, and was confirmed by Guinness World Records to be the oldest message in a bottle ever found—98 years. The bottle was found east of Shetland by Andrew Leaper, skipper of the Shetland-based vessel Copious, the same fishing vessel involved in the previous record recovery.
That previous record was a find that spent 92 years 229 days at sea. A bottom drift bottle, numbered 423B, was released at 60° 50'N 00° 38'W (about halfway between Aberdeen, Scotland and the coast of Denmark) on April 25, 1914 and recovered by fisherman Mark Anderson of Bixter, Shetland, UK, on December 10, 2006.
On the 13th of March 2013 the world’s largest message in a bottle weighing 2.5 tons and measuring 30 by 8 feet was towed 200 nautical miles off the coast of Tenerife where it was released to the ocean currents. The bottle was registered as a boat and equipped with AIS and radar reflector and navigation lights. It was constructed by Bård Eker, the owner of Koeningsegg. Every eight hours it is uploading photos to its personal Twitter account live via satellite. The initiative was a PR-stunt from Solo who invited people to follow the journey online via a gps in the bottle - and make a guess of where it would end up. In a press release on the 14th of August 2013, Solo announced that they had lost satellite contact with the bottle and reached out to Caribbean media in order to inspire locals to keep a look-out. The bottle was christened in Marina San Miguel by explorer Jarle Andhøy. (worth googling to see this bottle).
H&S Note : Have been traditional and used small glass bottles - Fake message in the bottles were glued shut to stop people signing them, you must sign the right one to claim this find.