22 Years and 1735 Miles Later...

...a message in a bottle washed up on the shore in western Alaska.

SEATTLE (AP) -- Merle Brandell and his black lab Slapsey were beachcombing along the Bering Sea when he spied a plastic bottle among the Japanese glass floats he often finds along the shore of his tiny Alaskan fishing village.

He walked over and saw an envelope tucked inside. After slicing the bottle open, Brandell found a message from an elementary school student in a suburb of Seattle. The fact that the letter traveled 1,735 miles without any help from the U.S. postal service is unusual, but that's only the beginning of the mystery.

Brandell has a theory about how the bottle ended up on the shore of Nelson Lagoon and how the letter remained so readable after its 21 years in transit. Maybe the bottle didn't spend those years in the water. It might have blown his way quickly and then remained buried in the mud for years.

It was found among some Japanese floats that took a similar journey many years ago. They don't really wash ashore. They extrude out of the mud and into the hands of beachcombers, who sell them on eBay or craft jewelry out of them like Brandell's mother does.


I remember reading years ago about currents in the Pacific Ocean, and tracing of items that float there. In a National Geographic special about the desert Clipperton Island, a researcher inexplicably found plastic army men washed ashore, not just a few, but dozens: Clipperton Island Castaway.