BANFFSHIRE, Scotland: Six-year-old Keely Reid was baffled after her attempt to send a message in a bottle to Norway went bizarrely wrong when she received a reply from a child in New Zealand.
Keely had thrown her plastic bottle into the Moray Firth in northeast Scotland while on a boat trip with her grandparents on July 25.
On September 8 it was picked up by another six-year-old, James Wilson, at Whangamata in New Zealand. He wrote back to his new penfriend and enclosed Keely's original note as proof.
It is estimated that to find its way to New Zealand in such a short time the bottle must have travelled an average of 684km per day at almost 29km/h.
Keely's family is baffled at how it could have got so far so fast. Her grandmother Pearl said: "I can't see how it got to New Zealand.
Did somebody maybe pick it up and fly it to New Zealand? It is a bit of a mystery." Bill Turrell of the Fisheries Research Station in Aberdeen, Scotland, said "it must have been picked up by somebody".
"As a scientist I would usually hedge my bets and leave room for some possibility but there is absolutely no way the bottle could have made it to New Zealand on its own ."
Keely sent a similar message from Aberdour in Scotland when she was three. It was returned by a Dutchman who found it while swimming off the coast of The Netherlands. She plans to send more bottles out round the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment