Message in a bottle

[This one first appeared in the Taylor Daily Press, later in Texas Fish & Game magazine. The postscript is that my brother used the prize package, just this summer, for his honeymoon.]

It has been said that neither time nor tide wait for any man. In March 2003, my brother and a friend of his disproved that maxim with a startling discovery.

While casting for finger mullet in a slough near Conn Brown Harbor in Aransas Pass, Sean Gilbert noticed a bottle bobbing between the roots of a mangrove. There appeared to be some sort of paper sealed inside the bottle and he threw it in the 5-gallon bucket he was carrying. My brother and Gilbert loaded the bucket with bait and returned to the boat.

"I took my pocket knife and tried to scrape off the tar that was around the neck of the bottle but it was real hard," Gilbert told me. "So I just broke the neck off with my knife and pulled the paper out."

"Look! I just won a trip," Gilbert laughed to my brother.

"We both just started cracking up," he told me. "We thought it was a prank, a joke someone put out there."

While the bottle was launched lightheartedly, it was no joke. A dozen rum bottles were emptied, sealed and cast into the Caribbean June 13, 1987 by Cayman-based Tortuga Rum Company. It was a promotion sponsored by the then-new bottler, Cayman Airways and Sunset House Hotel.

Four of the bottles were found within the next 18 months, all on South Padre Island.

The other eight disappeared - for nearly 16 years.

"It's unbelievable," said Robbie Hamaty, a Jamaica native and president of Tortuga Rum Company on Grand Cayman. "Every now and then it comes back across my mind. I was in Miami not even two or three months ago, and I said to myself, 'I wonder whatever happened to those bottles?' I figured a ship must have hit the rest of the bottles and they went down. I thought the promotion was all over."

My brother, John, said there were actually three pieces of paper in the bottle, in addition to the rum label entitling the bearer to a free case of rum.

One letter, on Cayman Airways letterhead, offered a free, one-way, coach ticket to the Cayman Islands. Another offered a four-day, three-night stay for two at Sunset House.

The offer's still good, and Hamaty got Cayman Airways to increase their bid to a round-trip for two. The airline offers non-stops from Houston to the Cayman Islands.

Still, the question remains: how the heck did a bottle launched from Grand Cayman in 1987 end up on the shores of Redfish Bay in 2003?

Dr. Bill Johns, an oceanographer at the University of Miami, said the most likely scenario is that the bottle, after sweeping through the Yucatan Channel, got caught in a loop current rather than shooting around Cuba, through the Straits of Florida and into the Atlantic.

"Sometimes that loop gets so large that it pinches off a big eddy," he said. "That eddy then propagates into the western Gulf."

Johns said he was surprised that all of the Tortuga Rum bottles found so far have been in Texas.

"If you were to randomly release particles into the Yucatan Channel, I would say chances are only one in 10 that they would end up on the Texas coast," he said.

Tony Amos, an oceanographer at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute at Port Aransas, has collected close to 70 bottled messages over the years. Some have traveled as far as 4,000 miles, he said, but none has taken more than two years to reach him.

Wind would have helped drive the bottle toward shore, Amos said, and once it was swept into the bay system, the chances of it getting out again would be very slim.

Amos said all kinds of messages turn up on Texas beaches.

"Everything from the whimsical to the obscene to people drinking too much on a boat out on the Gulf of Mexico to kids who want to see where the bottles end up," he said.
Every message he finds with a return address gets a reply.

"I've found a really interesting one, a kind of beautiful one after 9-11," Amos said. "It was written by a father to his two sons. He was obviously a merchant mariner and he wrote how he loved them. He used only initials. Such a beautifully written message. I think he was kind of influenced by 9-11."

Both my brother and his buddy say they were just excited to find something that had traveled so far and waited so long. They're not going to turn down the rum, of course, and I understand a sort of bidding war has broken-out over the airline tickets; still ... to be the recipient of something so random - something sent into the unknown as a hopeful act of faith - borders on magic.

"It's just nice to find something like that. Really nice," Amos said. "It's an interesting connection to the maritime world at large."