Four years ago a bottle with a short handwritten greeting was thrown into the sea somewhere along the Irish coast. It was signed Aoife.
Earlier this month, on a weekend trip to their summer home in Wildwood, New Jersey, more than 5,000 km away, Frank and Karen Bolger were doing their usual beach routine, taking a walk and picking up rubbish along the shoreline.
“We were coming back and my wife happened to look down at a clump of seaweed and she said ‘oh it’s a bottle’,” Frank explained of the chance discovery.
“I opened up the trash bag and we were getting ready to throw it away and she said oh no there’s a note in it.”
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After a prolonged struggle with a tweezers the small folded letter was eventually liberated. It said “Greetings from Ireland”.
“I have thrown this bottle into the sea for someone to find another day. Maybe it’s travelled down to Africa or up to Iceland!”
In the end, it travelled to the US, washing up at a well known beach resort once popular with Irish college students working J1 summer visas.
The Bolgers immediately set about finding the mysterious Aoife, who gave no last name. With the help of local newspaper The Wildwood Sun, word of the bottle and its content spread quickly over social media but to date the author’s identity remains a mystery.
The message was dated July 17th, 2019 so, excluding the possibility it was lying on the beach for any period of time, it could have taken four years to complete its epic transatlantic crossing.
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“The Wildwood Sun did a story about 10 years ago; a lifeguard found a bottle and it had been in the ocean for 10 years. But [the writer] had left his contact information so the lifeguard was able to contact him and a year later they actually met up in a restaurant in Wildwood,” Frank said.
“I did read online I think the longest a bottle was in the ocean was 40 years.”
A long shot they admit, but the Bolgers are holding out hope of finding Aoife and giving the note back.
“There’s a big Irish bar in north Wildwood which I thought of donating it to them and let them put it on display but again if we ever did meet up with her it would be up to her, it’s her note,” he said.
“It brings you back to a simpler time when people used to actually write letters.”
