A message in a bottle thrown into the ocean nearly 40 years in the past has been found on a seaside north of Perth.
Meg Prideaux took her son Leo, 4, “on the lookout for treasure” on the seaside of their hometown of Lancelin on Tuesday, when he noticed the bottle with a rolled-up word inside.
“We introduced it house and we waited for my daughter and my husband to come back house, however we couldn’t get it open,” she stated.
“There was a little bit of corrosion and some barnacles had began to develop, so it had been there for some time.”
After lastly managing to fastidiously open the lid with a knife, they slowly pulled out the word and unrolled it.
It was nonetheless a bit soggy however clearly legible — and dated 1985.
The message had been written 39 years in the past by then youngsters Joanne Hunter and Louise Pocock.
The 15-year-olds have been having fun with a vacation on the Hunter household’s seaside home in Lancelin, about two hours north of Perth, once they had the concept to write down a message in a bottle.
Their word got here with a easy request — that anybody who finds the bottle sends a return letter to the ladies in suburban Perth.
The pair had hoped it’d wash up in an unique land far-off nevertheless it got here proper again to Lancelin Seashore the place it was buried for nearly 40 years.
7NEWS has helped put Meg and Leo Prideaux in contact with Hunter, who’s now Joanne Evans and aged 54.
“I used to be like, ‘Oh my god. Is that actually that?’ I haven’t thought of that in eternally,” Evans stated.
“We wrote it at evening and sealed it with wax after which we truly swam it out into the water as a result of, at first, we threw it from the seaside and it stored washing again in, so we swam out the subsequent morning.
“My household had a seaside home straight throughout the highway and Louise got here with my household for the varsity holidays.
“She was at all times full of pleasure and had such a terrific creativeness, it was her thought to do it.”
Pocock died of leukaemia six years in the past however her sister, Sarah Martin, stated she would have loved “such a kick” figuring out the message had been discovered.
“Oh, she’d be so pleased, she actually would — particularly that a bit boy discovered it as nicely after 39 years simply sitting within the sand,” Martin stated.
“She was a very nice, enjoyable, happy-go-lucky kind of individual and actually did nicely in her life, very creative and artistic, and she or he met a beautiful man and married him and had an attractive little lady.
“As time goes on, you’re feeling like they’re slipping additional away from you after which this message is such a beautiful factor that simply got here out of the blue.”
She stated it had put a smile on the faces of Pocock’s complete household.
The Prideaux household now plan to fulfill Evans to return the bottle and the message to its unique creator a while within the close to future.
