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Stuffing a message in a bottle seems like a tired idea.
Writing a secret message under a small wooden boat and launching the sucker out to sea is seems way more fun, especially when the boat washes up on shore 27 years later.
Lynn and Mike BeBeau were walking the beach in Wisconsin came across the tiny little boat while “admiring the fall foliage and taking in the sunset,” the couple told Michigan Live.
The couple found a path off the beach that led to a remote Apostle Islands beach on the shore of Lake Superior and found a small red, white, and blue boat washing up on the beach.
“I noticed a little colored piece of wood buried in the sand about 20 feet from the water,” Mike told KBJR 6. “I thought it might have been a net buoy or a net float that had broken loose from a commercial fisherman’s boat or something but when I dug it out and then kind of washed it off, I was really surprised and I thought, ‘This is really cool.’”
Lynn posted photos of the “shipwreck” online because of the hidden message written underneath.
The hidden message read:
“I am traveling to the ocean. Please put me back in the water. Will you send information on your whereabouts to, Lakewood School, Room 116 & 118 5207 N. Tischer Duluth, MN 53304.”
Lynn did exactly what the message asked. She tossed the boat back into the water and contacted Lakewood Elementary School in Duluth, Minnesota. The school is roughly 100 miles west of the beach, according to Michigan Live.
School administrators told Lynn that the boat “started its journey 27 years earlier after a teacher read the award-winning children’s book ‘Paddle-to-the-Sea’ to her class.”
According to KBJR, teachers Bonnie Fritch and Brenda Schell each launched a wooden boat with their second-grade classes during a 1993 field trip to Brighton Beach, just north of Duluth.
Bonnie Fritch told the news outlet that this isn’t the first time someone stumbled upon the boat but the last discovery was years ago.
“Someone stumbled upon the red, white and blue ship farther up shore about a year after it launched, and put a second coat of varnish on the boat and relaunched it. I thought we wouldn’t hear any more about it. Amazing it is still out there.”
[via KBJR]
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