A family from Tairua who yesterday found a message in a washed up bottle saying it was written in 2002 is attempting to track down the mystery note sender.
It followed a weekend of wild weather on the east coast of the Coromandel Pensinsula including large swells and storm surges brought on by Cyclone Vaianu.
Neisha Rhind, 48, told 1News her family were checking out the conditions at Ocean Beach in Tairua, on the east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula, when her 10-year-old son Kaea came across a Jack Daniels bottle encrusted with shells.
"We weren't going on the beach with all the storm warnings and everything, we’d just gone down to actually have a look at how rough it was," she said.
"He was just kind of exploring at what had been washed up in the high tide line. So he thought it was a concrete brick, but then when he picked it up, saw that it was a bottle."
Rhind said they took the bottle home to open it and "try to preserve it as best as possible".
Inside, they discovered a paper note with singed edges and "a lot of the details smudged" attached to a string glued to the inside of the bottle’s cap.
Like something out of a real-life treasure hunt, the note begins by introducing the writer, saying: "Hi, My name is Jack."
"It appears [smudged] big game about [smudged] fishing but [smudged] luck fishing is as good as my [smudged]. I put this note in a bottle 17/02/2002 [smudged]. If someone finds it my luck will [smudged] contact me, Jack [smudged]."
Intrigued by the mystery sender, Rhind uploaded a picture of the note and bottle to her local Facebook page and enquired if anyone knew any information about the identity of the sender — to no avail.
Rhind said it was unclear where in the world the note had been written from, whether it was actually penned in 2002, or the age of the person who wrote it at the time.
"The edges of the note have been kind of burnt as well, like that pirate effect," she said.
"And even the way the string was attached in the bottle, so the note was kind of suspended from like a plastic cap within the JD bottle, and the string was threaded all through that, so it was kind of hanging like a pendulum, the note, so I would think of it someone small, a child, that had help to do that."
"It was a hard case because we'd actually just watched that old Castaway movie the night before with my son."
Cast Away was a 2000 survival drama starring Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland, a FedEx executive who becomes stranded on a deserted island after his plane crashes in the South Pacific.
"So I think he was thinking, 'Oh, could be someone trapped on an island somewhere!'" she laughed.
"As [the sender] indicated, he was waiting for his luck to change if the bottle was found. So, twenty-four years too late, but it is cool," Rhind said.
The morning's headlines in 90 seconds, including why not to get complacent about storm warnings, President Trump threatens to blockade the strait of Hormuz, and Justin Bieber takes over Coachella. (Source: 1News)
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