A 97-year-old message in a glass bottle was found by a fisherman near the Scottish island of Shetland, setting a new Guinness World Record.
The bottle was sent out to sea on June 10, 1914, by Captain C. H. Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation and was among 1,890 bottles that were released into the ocean, reported The Scotsman. These bottles were designed to sink downwards, floating close to the sea floor, to map under-currents of waters around Scotland.
The bottle contained a message, telling the finder to record the date and place where it was found and urged them to return it to the “Director of the Fishery Board for Scotland,” the Shetland Times reported.
Fisherman Andrew Leaper, who found the bottle, said that “it was just a normal day and we were out fishing for monkfish,” according to the Times.
“As we hauled in the nets—with a mixed catch of monks, megrim and cod—I spotted the bottle neck sticking out of the cod end of the net,” he added.
“I quickly grabbed the bottle before it fell back in the sea. I immediately knew what it was, having seen a previous drift bottle on display at the Maritime Museum in Aberdeen.”
In 2006, a 92-year-old bottle was discovered in the same area by Leaper’s friend, another fishing skipper who was fishing in the same boat.
“It was an amazing coincidence that the same Shetland fishing boat which found the previous record-breaking bottle six years ago also found this one,” Leaper said.
“It’s like winning the lottery twice—this is a widely used fishing ground, with half the North Sea fleet fishing here. It’s also remarkable that the bottle wasn’t crushed by the fishing gear.”
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