When Alaina Beresford was 12, she committed her message to the sea in an empty bottle of Moray Cup fizzy pop and now decades later she has received the surprise of her life
When Alaina Beresford chucked a message in a bottle into the sea aged just 12, she though little of it.
But she was staggered this week – 31 years on – to received a postcard explaining her old message had been found. It washed up nearly 725 miles away on a beach in Norway and was eventually discovered this week by Pia Brodtmann, who was volunteering with a charity on the sand.
The 27-year-old woman replied, sending a postcard alongside a montage of fascinating photographs. These include pictures of the message in a bottle, the boat Pia is living on (called the Nemo), and the area she’s working in.
Amazed to see her note had been discovered and was still legible, Alaina, 43, said: “When I went and checked my mail and thought ‘what’s this, a postcard?’ – not something you see a lot – and when I turned it over it had my name on it.
“The message from Pia said she’d found my message in a bottle near on a tiny island called Lisshelløya near Vega in Norway. She’s there working as a volunteer doing beach cleaning with a charity called In the Same Boat for four months. The postcard was a wonderful, a montage of photos showing my message in a bottle, the boat she’s on, the Nemo, and the area she’s working in.”
Alaina, from from Portknockie, Moray, now intends to keep in touch with Pia on Facebook. She continued: “I was just so shocked that somebody had found the message I sent all those years ago. It was amazing that my note was still perfectly legible – even the old Moray Cup bottle was in good shape!
“As far as I can remember we were doing a project on water with our P7 teacher Ann Bruce and part of that was doing a message in a bottle. I think her husband was a fisherman and he threw the bottle into the sea when he was out with the boat.” Alaina added that she would love to get in touch with her former teacher but does not have an address or contact details.
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For Pia herself, finding the bottle on Lisshelløya was something of a prophecy. She explained: “The day I found the bottle we cleaned two small exposed islands, Lisshelløya and Storhelløya, although we didn’t finish Storhelløya.
“I found the message between some rocks on Lisshelløya. I had already noticed before I picking it up, that the bottle wasn’t broken or full of water like so many other bottles I had found that day.
“It looked a bit different, probably because of the paper inside. When I picked it up and saw the folded paper with the little text ‘To the finder” inside, I knew this one would be special.
“It’s kind of funny, though, because I said at the start of the clean up something like ‘If we don’t find a message in a bottle on this island, then I don’t know where else we would’.
“I said that because in just the first few minutes we had been finding almost only bottles and some fishing gear. I read the message during our lunch break with my crewmembers.
“I wasn’t too surprised that it had come all the way from Scotland because I have already found some stuff from Scotland before, but I felt really happy about the little message, especially because the address was still readable. I was just curious when it had been written.
Writing a reply was never in doubt for Pia. She continued: “I thought Alaina would be really happy to know that her bottle had been found. She wrote in her note that she wanted to know who found it and where exactly it was found.
“I wanted to give her this information and make her day special, like she made my day special. Also I just like the idea of people randomly getting in touch this way. And maybe I was hoping for a pen pal across borders, because I enjoy the old ways of communicating like postcards and letters.
“Everyone is happy if there is something unexpectedly nice in the mail, while getting something digital via WhatsApp is less special and it can stress you out.
“When Alaina told me how old the message was, I almost freaked out. The idea that this bottle had been out there, either in the ocean or lying on the island, for over 30 years is just really crazy.
“It looked like it had been thrown in the sea something between some months and five years ago. The first thing I said after reading Alaina’s replay was something like ‘Wow, what were the chances that she still lives in that house?!’, but after she sent me some pictures from the coastline literally right in front of her home, I could totally understand why she is still living there. It’s just beautiful.”
Pia has been with the Norwegian In the Same Boat project since April this year and will remain with them until the end of July. Having recently finished her bachelor’s degree she wanted to travel around Europe and improve her English.
A love of the rugged Scandinavian landscape and a drive to do something to help the planet drew her to the project, which aims to fight marine pollution – especially plastic – along the Norwegian coastline.
Pia added: “The main method In the Same Boat uses to fight marine litter, besides raising awareness, is beach cleaning, but ‘beach’ in Norway isn’t really the right word.
“Norway’s coastline is mostly rocky, wild and remote, not a sandy beach. So we hike, climb and sometimes even crawl over and under rocks to collect the plastic before it becomes microplastic.
“Then we carry all the heavy bags of trash to the next spot, where the workboat can come and pick it up. The organisation is made up of employed skippers and volunteers.
“We all live together on sailboats, which allows us to move directly into the polluted areas. That saves time, emissions and costs. Lisshelløya, the tiny island where I found the message in a bottle – is so tiny that you can probably walk around in just five minutes. we picked and removed 1020kg of marine litter. Even though the island probably hadn’t been cleaned before, this amount of trash is just insane.”