Treasures From The Past: Man Finds 35-Year-Old Message In Bottle, Reunites It With Writer

Many people write messages, lock them up in bottles and release them into the sea in the hope they might find a receiver. Some messages do, some are lost forever and some find a reader, years, nay decades later.

That is what happened in the case of a kayaker who found a message in a bottle floating in a Delaware river. The message was reportedly written 35 years ago and the kayaker who found it, managed to reunite the letter with the woman who wrote it.

WRDE Coast TV

When Brad Wachsmuth saw a floating bottle in water about 2 miles (3 kilometers) offshore of the Broadkill River he thought it was a piece of trash. He discovered the bottle just just a few days after Tropical Storm Isaias swept through the area, WRDE Coast TV reports.

¡°As we usually do as kayakers, we try to pick up trash out of the water when we can," he reportedly said.

However, Wachsmuth's friend noticed there was something inside the bottle, and sure enough the two found a letter written by Cathi Riddle and her cousin, Stacey Wells, dated 35 years ago on August 1, 1985. The letter described their family pets and asked the reader if they had any of their own, among other childhood musings.

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Wachsmuth took the letter to the Milton Historical Society and a curator helped him reach out to the family. The two were put in touch.

Riddle lives just some miles away in Milton and Wachsmuth traveled to return the letter to her last week. He said that he was surprised that the message in the bottle ended up in the same water even after decades of storms and tides, but Riddle believes that maybe, it was fate.

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¡°My cousin and I were staying at the beach and we decided to write the letter and send it out and see how far it went. It didn¡¯t travel very far, but perhaps it traveled the world and came back,¡± she reportedly said.

Imagine having done something, having sent something out in the world, forgetting all about it and finding the same thing in your hand decades later. Just what are the chances of a person ending up with a message they left in water and finding it 35 years later?