The granddaughter of a man who discovered a message in a bottle from a Dubliner on the shores of Alaska more than half a century ago has come to Ireland to track down the family of the Inchicore man who wrote the note.
It was the winter of 1964 and Michael Perensovich, a wildlife biologist based in the city of Juneau in Alaska, had been sent out on a field exhibition to record the number of moose in the Yakutat region north of the city.
Perensovich and his wife had moved from California to Alaska in the late 1950s where the couple bought land near the city of Juneau and built a log cabin. He was often sent on field trips by the forestry department to remote parts of the Alaska and in 1964 he travelled to the Yakutat borough which is known for its long stretches of sandy beach.
“That’s where he was the day he found the bottle,” says Kari Perensovich, Michael Perensovich’s granddaughter. “You get a lot of debris washing in on the sand from all over.”
Perensovich, on a break from counting moose, was combing the Yakutat beach for Japanese glass fish floats – another item which often washed up on the Alaskan shores – when he noticed a small glass bottle buried in the sand. Inside the bottle was a piece of brown paper with a name and address clearly printed in black marker.
“Finder please write John J. Fricker, 215 Sarsfield Road, Inchicore, Dublin 8,” says the message. “Dropped into the Mid-Pacific Ocean April 7th 1963. From M/V Irish Rowan.”
A year after discovering the bottle, Perensovich wrote a letter to the address in Dublin but never heard back. "He wrote to the address a couple of times but never heard anything," his granddaughter told The Irish Times. "He's always told people about it and if ever you go over to the house he says 'hey, did I show you my message in the bottle?' "
Kari, who works as a tour guide in the city of Sitka on Baranof Island where her grandfather has lived since the 1970s, is hoping to find the Fricker family during her summer trip to Ireland. Perensovich has visited Ireland a number of times but only recently remembered the glass bottle that sits in her grandfather’s home. “It’s in a glass case and he hadn’t talked about it in a long time. When I said I was going to try and follow it up he got really excited.”
Perensovich, who is originally from a small mining village in western Pennsylvania and flew as a pilot in the second world war, will turn 92 later this month. "My grandma passed away a few years ago but he still has his daily routine and does all his errands. He does all the yard work, he's very active for his age."
Kari says she is the first member of her family to try and find out who dropped the bottle in the Pacific Ocean. “Everyone’s heard the story a million times so I was like, why hasn’t anybody tried this? I’m the first one to follow it up. It sits on the mantle in his house and he sees it every day. It would mean the world to him if we could find the family.”
