OT: Message in a Bottle

Opus

March 10, 2006

Sending out an S-O-S...cute story from the Boston Globe:

Message in bottle spanned 3,500 miles

Genevive Hernandez, a Lynn seventh-grader, put a message in a bottle and cast it into the sea in 2003 as part of a science project. Yesterday, she read the reply she received from Morocco. (Boston Globe Photo / Robert Spencer)

By Kay Lazar, Globe Correspondent | March 10, 2006

LYNN -- Genevive Hernandez knows that messages ricochet around the world all the time on the Internet. But she never imagined that the note she carefully tucked into a Sprite bottle and launched from a Lynn beach two years ago as part of a fifth-grade science project would find its way to North Africa.

So she was beaming yesterday, with proof in hand: a letter, postmarked Morocco, from a 26-year-old man who said he found her green bottle while working at a beach in Azemmour, which is not far from Casablanca.

Given how stormy it was the day the 28 students released their bottles -- Nov. 20, 2003 -- the Lynn teenager is still amazed that hers made it past the rocky shores.

''I thought it wasn't going anywhere," said Hernandez, now 13 and in seventh grade. ''Mine was stuck on the seaweed."

The surf was so rough that their teacher, Sheila Thomas, had to wade out several times to coax the minivessels back out to sea.

''The bottles kept coming back up on the rocks because the winds and waves were really high," recalled Thomas, who now teaches math at another Lynn school, Drewicz Elementary. ''I ended up getting soaking wet."

Half of the bottles never made it out of Massachusetts. Thomas and her students received replies from 14 people, most of them from the Cape Cod area and all by late December of that year. For weeks, Hernandez was disappointed that her bottle, which carried a bright orange card wrapped in plastic and bearing the school's address, was apparently lost at sea. Eventually she forgot about it.

Then a letter, handwritten in broken English, arrived last week at the Brickett School, where Hernandez attended classes two years ago. The writer said that his name is Assila Ahmed, and that he found the bottle while working at the beach with a friend around 10:30 in the morning on Dec. 18, 2005.

''I am a boy, 26 years old," he wrote. ''I speak English a little."

Fortunately, a parent of one of the students at the school speaks French and helped translate the bumpy parts. Ahmed apparently works as a fisherman, Thomas said. And he has a high school education. Ahmed ended his short letter with a simple request: to receive a letter from the author of the message in the bottle. He included his phone number and address.

''We just left a message on the machine," Thomas said yesterday. ''We weren't able to talk to a person yet. We are going to write to him."

Before the Morocco letter, the reply that traveled the farthest came from England, in 2002.

But Hernandez's bottle easily trumps that. By Thomas's calculations, her bottle traveled more than 3,500 miles to Morocco. And she figures there are about 50 more bottles her students sent to sea that are still out there. Somewhere.