The barnacle-crusted bottle went on a journey that has the misty romance of a classic sea yarn.
It apparently circled the Atlantic, ending up in the hands of a Charleston man two years after the journey began.
The bottle that Austin Torrey of Lizella, Ga., flung into the riptide during a family vacation traveled a 5,000-mile-or-so odyssey from Nantucket Island, Mass., to Stocking Island, Exumas, twirling in the prevailing ocean currents as far away as the Azores and then back across to the Florida Straits.
Bob Sadler, a retired Charleston physician, found it earlier this year as he scoured the Bahaman beach for driftwood to build a fire.
“I don’t know what possessed me to pick it up, except that it had barnacles on it,” Sadler said. “You’re always looking for some little bit of treasure.”
Sadler and his wife, who roam the Caribbean in their 44-foot sailboat Barefootin’, are like any other seagoer — fascinated with oddities floating in the flotsam and jetsam. The mysteries are part of the adventure. Francie Sadler collects sea beans, seed pods that ride ocean currents from Africa and look like stone jewelry. Bob Sadler shows a Spanish fisherman’s metal buoy he found.
The age-old romance of a message in a bottle is irresistible.
“It’s just that you found something somebody wanted you to find,” Francie Sadler said.
A few weeks earlier, the couple had come across a bottle with a note on the beach at Sapelo Island, Ga. A sailor had written and launched it near Beaufort, N.C., for his girlfriend back home in Maryland. He, too, had been launching messages for years, and this was the first to be brought to her.
So when Sadler brought the bottle he found in the Bahamas to his wife, they pulled the cork and tried to work free a message without tearing it. Other couples on the beach joined in. They couldn’t get one out.
Finally, Francie Sadler couldn’t resist — she broke open the bottle. The former schoolteacher pored over the handwritten notes with delight.
“If you don’t write back,” one child had scribbled, “there will be a curse put on you.”
No seafarer is going to chance that. The eight messages were all from children. There was no return address, nowhere to write — only the name of a school, Redding Elementary, which closed in 2002. Taking a clue from one note and a clue from another, Francie Sadler put the information together like a treasure map.
Third-grade Georgia teacher Diane Vogel had just about given up on her annual class project. For 30 years, she’d had a student or two toss a bottle of classmates’ notes into the ocean while on summer vacation.
She had never gotten back a response.
When Francie Sadler got in touch with her, “I was just absolutely floored,” Vogel said.
Austin had been “beside himself” with the idea of notes from his classmates and him swirling through the ocean to be discovered, Vogel said. Now 11 years old, he’s more interested in baseball than what he did when he was 8.
But when he heard from his old teacher where his bottle had been found, he looked at his father, Ben Torrey, and said, “That’s weird.”
“You look at that bottle and you think what kind of journey it’s been on,” Sadler said. “The more I thought about the bottle, the more I realized that.”
The Sadlers sailed home last week to Charleston. Vogel plans to retire at the end of the 2005 school year, so she has only two more chances to send her class’s messages into the surf.
Her current class already is looking for a bottle.
By Bo Petersen, The Post and Courier – Charleston.net
