We found our first message in a bottle at Egypt Bay in Kent in 2011. It was written by a little girl 2 years previously. Since then we have always kept an eye open for messages thrown into the river Thames or the River Medway and we have found several. Some poignant, some funny, some philosophical and some....well some are quite rude actually! Each of them tell a story though and so I am starting to keep a record of them. The first message which I will write about, we found in January 2013. It is the most poignant we have found, and was a bottle containing the ashes of a young lady called Clare who had been about to sail the world before very sadly, she died without fulfilling her wish. Her family hoped that by sending her ashes out to sea, her spirit would be set free. I have no doubt that it did. We subsequently met Clare's family which was really lovely.
This is the message which Clare's family placed in a bottle before throwing into the River Thames. We found it 6 months later near Greenwich.
message from finn found in a broken beer bottle. it floated down the river from southwark and ended up on the shores of an old ship breaker's yard in Greenwich. Our next message was found in a broken beer bottle in July whilst we were mudlarking in Greenwich. It was from a 12 year old boy called Finn. We wrote to him to tell him we'd found his message, and he invited us to visit him on the barge where he lives on the river with his family. We haven't been yet, but fully intend to. We were also contacted by a TV producer who had been with Finn when he threw the message in the Thames, who asked if he could film us down by the river where we found the bottle. This we did, but my commentating skills were not that great and certainly not entirely natural!! ( I would not make a great news reporter or weather girl!), and so I do not know if he got a good enough clip of me trying to explain how we found it, and why we are always down by the river searching for things...... I did however manage to turn the tables and get a picture of him in return for me having to repeat my script about 7 times!!
Here is Danny the film producer, after filming us talking about our message in a bottle find!
message to Jeff from his grandchildren This next message, also found in July 2013 was a personal message from children to their grand father Jeff whom they had never met, so once we had read it, we put it back in the bottle and sent it on its way. We found it in the Medway near Cliffe in Kent.
cryptic message destined for .... we will never know! To finish off this evening's first message in a bottle blog entry, Im including the short, sweet and a bit rude message, unsigned of course - found yesterday again along the Greenwich shores, carefully inserted into a plastic bottle. I wonder who he was writing to! I'm sure whoever it was, would be very flattered (!?) or maybe not. I shall continue tomorrow with some more. if anyone, finds any messages in bottles themselves, I'd love to hear about them. X
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