ASTORIA, Ore. – When Christopher Wattam was 11, he knew something about geography that he wanted to share with somebody, perhaps in Asia.
He wrote a message that he and his parents put in a wine bottle and pitched into the Pacific Ocean:
“Dear Finder,” he wote, explaining that “you may not know” the location of his hometown. “Coquitlam is a city near Vancouver (B.C.). Now if you don’t know where Vancouver is, you don’t know your geography.”
“We live in Canada, which is our country,” he wrote. “You probably think of the Pacific Ocean as the East Coast, but we know it as the West Coast and that is where Vancouver is.”
He asked anyone who read the message to send a postcard. His message was dated May 9, 1995.
Last weekend, 250 miles to the south, Mary Graham and her family were on their weekly beachcombing expedition at Sunset Beach south of Astoria, Ore. She spotted a wine bottle amid the flotsam at the high-tide mark.
“Holy moly, there’s a message in a bottle,” she remembered saying as she recounted the story to the Daily Astorian newspaper.
Christopher Wattam, now 22, is spending a year in Australia working as a geological technician at a mine between his junior and senior years at the University of British Columbia.
He’s a bit out of touch. The newspaper telephoned his parents in Coquitlam. There’s no telephone service where their son works, so they e-mailed him about the 11-year-old message in a bottle, but have gotten no response.
His father, David Wattam, said the message was launched when the family was on a weekend whale-watching expedition in Tofino on Vancouver Island.
David Wattam said he and his wife probably put Christopher up to it. “It was something I did when I was a kid,” he said. But he said none of his messages was ever answered.
“We just watched it float it away. We never imagined it would get found by someone,” he said.
Where the bottle floated is anyone’s guess.
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