Message in a bottle traveled 5 months from Atlantic Ocean to the North Carolina shore
With an “un, deux, trois,” the French girl tosses the bottle from the back of a cruise ship sailing through the Atlantic Ocean. A video uploaded to YouTube captures the moment 12-year-old Ambre Dorange launched the bottle, with a message in French rolled up on a piece of paper inside.
The girl was on a cruise from the Caribbean to the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa in April, according to WFMY. Five months later, the bottle washed ashore in Sunset Beach, North Carolina, with other debris pushed up onto the beach from Hurricane Florence in September.
Jake Wilson was walking with his son along Sunset Beach in September to see how the shore fared after Florence.
“I said to my son Blake, I said, you know you have to check these bottles because one of them could have a message in it. And I honestly only walked about ten feet and it was like five seconds after I said that, the bottle was laying right there on the beach,” Wilson told WFMY.
He wrote on Facebook that day: “We found a message in a bottle just SW of 40th Street. What I can gather is ‘Hello, my name is Ambre. I am 12 years old and I live in France. When you get this message........................(can’t make out the text)............” “Thanks” “10/4/2018 between Bridgetown (Barbados) and Teneriffe (Canaries Islands).”
The message was dated in the European format, with the day and then the month, for April 10.
The French site Maville said Ambre Dorange lives in Seine-Saint-Denis near Paris. When the girl returned home for school for a couple days, she found a message waiting from Wilson, the site reports.
“He is a father. He was coming out of three days of confinement because of the hurricane Florence . As his job is to take fishing tourists at sea, he had come to see, with his little boy, the damage on the beach, “ Albane, the girl’s mother, told Maville.
Wilson shared an update on Facebook: “I was able to make out the email address by reading the impressions on the paper. Me, the little girl-Ambre and her mom have been emailing/messaging back and forth. The bottle was thrown overboard from a cruise ship in April while they were on vacation (thrown overboard somewhere between Barbados and the Canary Islands). The mom honestly thought it would never end up in anyone’s hands but went along with her daughter’s wish.”
“It’s always interesting how you meet random people in life through the strangest circumstances and sometimes they become friends ... I hope so,” he wrote.
Dorange and her mother flew to North Carolina this week to visit Wilson and his son, WFMY reports. “We’ve been having a great time. It’s just amazing that people will make a journey all the way across the Atlantic and you know something as simple as this bottle, you know, can bring people together,” Wilson said, according to WFMY.
Charles Duncan: 843-626-0301, @duncanreporting
This story was originally published October 24, 2018 at 11:10 AM.