How one man found 83 messages in bottles

Ed and Carol Meyers were watching the sun rise on a North Carolina beach when the idea struck. “Ed looked off to the side and saw a wine bottle,” recalls Carol Meyers. “We decided, let’s send a message in a bottle. Why not?”

It was February 14, 1999 — their first wedding anniversary — and the mood seemed right.

They wrote a note on some hotel stationary and stuffed it into the bottle, along with a small piece of cake. Hand in hand, they chucked it into the Atlantic Ocean, and watched it bob out to sea.

“I expected it would wash up on the shore not too far away, and that would be the end of it,” says Mrs. Meyers. “But it wasn’t.”

In May of 2007, 22-year-old Clint Buffington was exploring the shores of an unnamed Caribbean island in Turks and Caicos with his dad and brother.

“At the time, we were just beachcombers — we were looking for shells, sharks’ teeth, things like that,” he says.

They’d traversed a few of the region’s mostly uninhabited islands with minimal luck. Then, on the third day of the trip, Buffington spotted something unusual jutting out of the sand: “a little green bottle with the cork still in it.”

“There was a lightning flash moment,” he recalls: “Oh my God, there’s paper in there … and there’s writing on it.”

Buffington returned to the United States with his new treasure, and the forensics process began.

Eight years at sea had not been kind to the paper inside. “It was dry, brittle, and damaged,” he says. “I had to sit there with tweezers and a spray bottle and gently get it out.”

Once he successfully removed the message, Buffington was able to piece it together and read the note:

“Carol and Ed Meyers celebrated their first wedding anniversary at the Sanderling Inn Resort on February 14th, 1999. They were wed on Valentine’s Day, 1998, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA. Included in this note is some of our wedding cake.

Peace and love to you,
We wish you happiness.

Ed Meyers
Carol Meyers”

Buffington immediately felt a compulsion to find the Meyers, but he didn’t have a whole lot to go off of.

The message, written on resort stationary, included contact info, but Buffington’s efforts to contact the location were “a dead end.” Though it also listed a date and location for the couple’s wedding, months of Googling yielded no leads. Back in 2007, social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn were relatively small; Buffington was “trying to find information in the infancy of the information age.”

After an entire year of fruitless research, he contacted Cathy Dyson, a reporter at the Fredericksburg Freelance-Star. She published a story documenting Buffington’s find, and by complete chance, a friend of the Meyers saw it, and alerted the Meyers.

A few days later, Buffington — who was working as a deckhand on a Chicago tour boat at the time — received this email from Carol Meyers:

After finding Carol and Ed Meyers’s message in a bottle and connecting with the couple, Buffington made it something of a life mission to hunt down as many messages in bottles as he could find.

Today, Buffington has found 83 messages in bottles all around the world.

Many of them still remain unopened: The messages are delicate, fragmented, and sometimes require months to piece together. But he’s also tracked down many senders, met several in person, and made new, unlikely friendships — all experiences he records on his blog, Message in a Bottle Hunter.

He’s discovered messages in all varieties of containers: beer bottles, plastic jugs, pill bottles, and — the most popular — good old fashioned wine bottles, re-corked. The messages he’s recovered span from just a few months old to more than 50 and cover a wide range of topics.

“Some people send love letters in bottles — they just need to get something off their chest and move on,” says Buffington. “Others send messages just for fun, from cruise ships or island vacations. They also send them to commemorate a loved one who has died.”

Sometimes, he says, a bottle will have a person’s ashes and a note along the lines of: “This person really wanted to travel and didn’t really get a chance to, so we’re sending him on a big journey now.”

His oldest find is a 1959 bottle from Guinness. That year, the beer company dropped 150,000 bottles in the sea as a marketing stunt. Inside Buffington’s was a made-up message from the sea god Neptune and an ad for Ovaltine.

But for Buffington, the real treasure is the human element that lies behind each message.

A few years ago, he discovered an old Coca-Cola bottle with a simple note inside:

“Return to 419 Ocean Boulevard and receive an award of $150. From the owner of Beachcomber Motel.”

He used the serial number on the bottle to determine it was from the late 1970s, then tracked down the Beachcomber Motel in Hampton, New Hampshire. By then, the message’s author has passed away, and his daughter was running the motel. Buffington flew to New Hampshire to deliver the note to her in person. It was the last letter she ever got from her father.

”Oh my God,” she told a local news station, upon seeing it. “That’s my father’s writing.”

Then there was the time when Buffington discovered two messages in bottles — sent from different locations in England, 30 years apart — only to find that one of the senders serendipitously knew the other’s brother.

It may seem highly improbable that one person could find so many of these things. For most of us, the message in a bottle is purely folkloric, existing in pop songs and terrible Nicholas Sparks novels.

But Buffington doesn’t operate on pure luck: There is some science behind his success.

For at least 200 years, researchers have used messages in bottles to deepen our understanding of ocean currents. And since the early 1900s, an estimated six million bottled messages have been released at sea, 500,000 of which are attributed to oceanographers.

In their book Flotsametrics (2009), Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano claim that so-called “bottle papers” were first deployed by Navy Admiral Alexander Becher in an effort to understand the directionality of gyres — the six circulating current systems in the middle of our oceans. In a series of different projects between 1846 and 1966, the US government scattered thousands of messages in bottles in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and used reported discoveries to piece together maps of our ocean current systems.

Today, GPS sensors and satellite technologies have, for the most part, replaced the message in a bottle as a tracking device.

Our knowledge of ocean currents has dramatically improved since the 1900s. And as a result, people like Clint Buffington have been able to systematically target where a bottle thrown in the ocean might land.

Looking a maps of currents, Buffington is able to deduce several basic tips for finding messages in bottles sent from certain locations.

“In the North Atlantic, water always goes clockwise, more or less,” he says. “It’s similar in the Pacific: When the big tsunami hit Japan in 2011, a lot of the debris washed up on the shores of Oregon and Washington.”

Generally, says Buffington, if you’re hunting for bottles on the Northwestern US coast, you’ll likely find them coming from the Pacific Islands and Asia; if you’re looking on the Atlantic US coast, you’ll find bottles from England and Central America.

Ed and Carol Meyers’s note — sent from North Carolina and found in the Caribbean — was likely picked up by the Gulf Stream, carried along the North Atlantic Current, sucked up by the Canary Current, then dumped into Turks and Caicos by the Northern Equatorial Current. Buffington estimates the bottle went through this cycle two full times (at about three to four years per journey), and traveled more than 5,000 miles before he found it eight years later.

Messages in bottles also illuminate a darker scientific trend: that of trash in the ocean.

As messages in bottles follow the seas’ current patterns, so do billions of pounds of trash and microplastics. Generally, the places where messages in bottles tend to collect are also major landing zones for garbage.

“The first time I went to the Caribbean, I couldn’t believe what I saw there,” says Buffington. “Here I was in paradise, surrounded by miles of trash: flip-flops, shirts, refrigerators, microwaves, televisions, computers, blackberry phones, cameras, and fluorescent tubes. Some places you go, it’s just a carpet of light bulbs.”

For Buffington, there is a thin but distinct line between trash and treasure.

“There are a lot of folks who say you should never send a message in a bottle — it’s pollution,” he says. “I get that. But messages in bottles are not the source of the pollution problem; they are a window into another dimension.”

The “dimension” Buffington refers to is the type of human connection that can only be forged through chance.

Today, Clint Buffington and the Meyers (the couple who sent that bottle back in 1999) are close friends.

Buffington, now an English teacher living in Salt Lake City, Utah, has taken three trips to Washington, DC to meet up with them. On his most recent journey, I joined them, and they reflected at length on the bottle that brought them together.

“When we found each other, my mother had just been diagnosed with cancer, and she was going to quickly die. Doctors [had also] found an un-ruptured brain aneurysm in me,” Meyers told Buffington. “In the middle of all that horror, and pain, and grief was this magical experience of [you] finding this bottle.”

“It was a huge turning point in my life too,” replies Buffington, holding Carol’s original message. “Finding that bottle defines who I am now.”

As a kid, Buffington had a unique dream: “to meet everyone alive.” As an aged realist, connecting with random souls through messages in bottles is a realistic iteration of that dream.

“I’m not going to let politics, or social media, or algorithms determine who I’m friends with,” he says. “To not live in a world full of strangers — that’s all I want.”