38-year-old message in a bottle washes up on beach
A message in a bottle written almost 40 years ago has been discovered by a four-year-old at a beach in Perth.
Meg Prideaux took her son Leo, 4, “looking for treasure” at the beach in their hometown of Lancelin, when he spotted the bottle with a rolled-up note inside.
“We brought it home and we waited for my daughter and my husband to come home, but we couldn’t get it open,” she said.
“There was a bit of corrosion and a few barnacles had started to grow, so it had been there for a while.”
After a bit of trouble, they got the bottle open and unfurled the soggy, but still legible, letter and found it dated from 1985.
The message had been written 39 years ago by then-teenagers Joanne Hunter and Louise Pocock, who were 15 when they wrote the note while on holiday.
Their note came with a simple request — that anyone who finds the bottle send a return letter to the girls in suburban Perth.
With the help of 7News, Meg and Leo Prideaux were able to track down Joanne Hunter, who is now Joanne Evans and aged 54.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god. Is that really that?’ I haven’t thought about that in forever,” Evans said.
“We wrote it at night and sealed it with wax and then we actually swam it out into the water because, at first, we threw it from the beach and it kept washing back in, so we swam out the next morning."
“My family had a beach house directly across the road and Louise came with my family for the school holidays. She was always full of excitement and had such a great imagination, it was her idea to do it.”
Pocock died of leukaemia six years ago but her sister, Sarah Martin, said she would have enjoyed “such a kick” knowing the message had been found.
“Oh, she’d be so happy, she really would — especially that a little boy found it as well after 39 years just sitting in the sand,” Martin said.
“She was a really great, fun, happy-go-lucky sort of person and really did well in her life, very artistic and creative, and she met a wonderful man and married him and had a beautiful little girl.
“As time goes on, you feel like they’re slipping further away from you and then this message is such a wonderful thing that just came out of the blue.”
The Prideaux family now plan to meet Evans to return the bottle and the message to its original author some time in the near future.
Image credits: 7News / Prideaux family