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Ashore in Clarencetown, Harbormaster Henry Majors and his wife Ena, who run the small grocery, referred us to a nearby lady with Spanish skills. We learned the bottle and note were released by a Spanish fisherman 18 months earlier, 50 miles off the Portuguese coast. We posted the fisherman a letter from Clarencetown containing the lat and lon where found. A letter from Spain awaited us when we returned to our home in Maryland that summer. After another translation adventure we discovered we were invited to vacation with him in Spain. The letter contained directions to his home both by land and sea.

Beachcombing takes on a life of its own after once finding the elusive bottle containing a note. Bottles partially buried in the sand are never left unearthed. They must be examined.

Moonshadow’s log indicates we arrived in Clarencetown from Rum Cay on March 14, 1989. The bottle was found the following day. March 22, 2006, seventeen years later, at Double Breasted Cay in the Jumentos, 70 miles south west of Clarencetown, Carol found another. The tightly sealed wine bottle contained a post card that, unfortunately, the senders failed to address. There’s a nice photo of the cruise ship "Costa Romantica," but no message. Bob Nimmo, N4OWP, Googled the ship and reported it as an Italian Cruise ship that only sails the Med. Maybe they get close enough to Gibraltar for the westerly flowing currents to carry it to the Bahamas.

The following week we moved to nearby Hog Cay. Some say this is the most beautiful of the Jumento cays, a statement with witch we tend to agree. We found a small difficult goat path across the island to the windward beach. Flotsam and jetsam was everywhere along with hundreds of bottles to examine. Carol was soon waving another bottle.--unbelievable! After a seventeen year dry spell, we’d found two within a week.

The heavily abraded dark green wine bottle appeared to have had a rough journey. We saw a folded note inside a Ziploc bag, soggy from the leaking cork. The plastic bag had been rotted by the sun and shredded as we tried to remove it along with the note without breaking the bottle. Finally, using seizing wire and tweezers, we removed it intact. Unfolding it was disappointing.

Sun and salt water had taken a toll on the note, making it mostly unreadable. The heavily soaked schoolbook type paper soon dried in the cockpit, but the faded block printing improved little. Using a variety of magnifying devices aboard over the next few days we felt confident we had a zip code. Again, we called on N4OWP and he later reported it was for Smithtown, New York. A few of the Smithtown letters were visible on the note, so we felt confident the zip was correct. Perhaps the sender was from Smithtown, but where was the bottle released?

Over the next few months several cruising friends, many with younger eyes, examined the note without anything useful surfacing. Just another unsolved mystery of the sea.

Soon after returning to our place in N. Ft. Myers, where we’re summer residents, we installed Comcast’s high speed cable and dug out the note again. Google maps, U. S. Post Office data, Nassau County property records and a number of other sites along with the scattered numbers and letters visible on the note produced a phone number in Smithtown, out on Long Island, New York.

Finally, in late July, I spoke to Joe Brittman of Smithtown, N. Y. Mr. Brittman and his two sons Jared and Zack were fishing off Montauk Point aboard their boat many years ago and Jared, the younger of the two, released the bottle. Joe didn’t recall how many years ago this happened, but said the boys were small. Possibly five years ago, he said. Jared’s now thirteen.

Tom & Carol aboard Moonshadow
Boot Key Harbor
Marathon

Note:
For you hams that have been around for a few years, check your log book for March 14, 1989. I thought my ICOM had gone south when I tuned into the Net from Rum Cay for weather that morning. Along with K3AY who was nearby aboard Mowgli, we had been entertained for hours the night before by a spectacular Northern Lights show .

Editor's Note:
I remember seeing the Northern Lights while I was anchored with my family off of Musha Cay, in the Exumas, in 1989. I was nine, and it was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen. That was probably the only time in recorded history that the lights had been visible in the Bahamas. Thanks to Tom and Carol for reminding me.