Allain tracked down the sender and learned this was not the first message he had sent, nor the first that was returned to him.
He had borrowed the expensive equipment from a friend. Determined to retrieve it, the surfer mapped out the area and waited for the bad weather to die down before swimming through cold, choppy waters to a nearby island to conduct the search.
After hours, Allain eventually located the missing kite, but he also noticed something shiny half stuck in the swampy ground: a sealed bottle containing a note and a small object.
He picked it up.
Allain drove home, looking forward to a warm meal and a hot shower. But what was in the bottle? “I had completely forgotten about it,” he told The Epoch Times, “so we went in the truck to retrieve it.”
Inside, he found three pages with handwritten script, which he read, and he learned that the bottle was discharged by a local man in his 70s who had been sending messages like this for 30 years.
The man would write a short letter with his address in the hopes of making new acquaintances across the world, Allain explained.
“He had no one to pass on his mother’s wedding ring, thus he placed it inside this one bottle in the hope that it would find a good home,” Allain explained.
Fortuitously, the week prior to finding the ring, Allain had proposed to his girlfriend of five years, Liosa.
The couple decided to contact the sender, a retired miller, and even decided to pay him a visit. Bearing a box of Christmas chocolates, they visited the man and were entertained with tales of messages in bottles sent over the course of decades.
Another bottle had washed up and was discovered by a teacher whose students sent droves of Christmas cards to the retiree. While remaining anonymous and declining to be interviewed, the man says that he is happy his bottles are bringing joy to others.
