i hope that someone gets my ... i hope that someone gets my ...

in march of 2004, my friend karpov had won a trip on the party poker million cruise, a semi-drunken soiree of card playing and high gluttony that would happen entirely on a cruise ship from san diego, around the tip of baja mexico and back. his wife passed on the idea of going and karpov sure as hell didn't have to ask me twice if i wanted a free ride.

in the off times when i wasn't gorging an unreasonable amount of food into my pie hole, talking to the living barbie doll that roomed next door about her contemplated boob job, or speaking bahasa to the balinese stewards (they were shocked); i wrote messages, put them in bottles and threw them off the back of the ship, using tricks i'd learned from a web site.

'lo and behold, i got this watery response in my email today:

Hello b1...,from Colombia!!!! Fishing 40 miles from the coast of Bahia Solano-Chocó-Colombia october 24 at 3:30, on a weed line, we found a green wine bottle with a message and one dollar, it took 19 months to reach here. The message was written march 24 3:30..strange isn't it?

assuming i chucked this message half-way down the baja peninsula, according to google earth the shortest possible distance it could have traveled in that time is 3200 miles (5200 km), or about five miles a day.

how amazingly, fantastically, cool is that?


[10/28/05: when i alerted karpov about the note-and-bottle incident, he informed me that he had actually taken photos of a couple of the bottles we'd launched -- and here they be. neither of these are the bottle that was recovered...
...the note in the tall bottle was wrapped so tightly around the pen that i just sent the pen along too -- you can see the point just poking out the bottom of the roll.]

[photos (c) 2004 r.h.s. iv]

3/6/18

This just published today.  Oldest known message in bottle ever found!

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-43299283