Nine-year-old boy finds message in a bottle

by Sumana Saparamadu

Osin Millea, was a nine-year-old boy living in Ireland. His one great pastime was looking for treasures along the beach near his home. One day he found one, tucked inside a two litre bottle: A letter written in French rolled up tightly and still perfectly dry.

The message had been put inside the bottle and pitched into the water in 2004 by two Canadian girls on vacation along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. It had taken eight years to travel some 2,500 miles before washing ashore near the tiny village of Passage East, in county Waterford in Ireland.

"I thought it was a piece of rubbish," nine-year-old Osin told the Toronto star.

"I really didn't think anything until I opened it."

"He's always searching for bits of treasure," his mother told the Montreal Gazette. "That was a treasure for him."

Osin and his mother rushed home to translate the hand written note, which is when they discovered that it had come from Canada, not from France as they had assumed.

It read: "Hello, we are two girls who had the idea to launch a bottle into the sea.

We are called Charlaine and Claudia. We are on vacation, in the village of Grande Vallee. We had the idea to launch a bottle into the sea because we saw a TV show about young people putting messages in bottles. If you find our bottle, tell us when and how you found our bottle. Also tell us your name, age, place of residence, example, Paris Miami etc.

To contact write to us at...... or go to an internet cafe because we are very curious to know if our bottle was found." - Charlaine and Claudia.

The email address no longer worked, but Osin's story sparked so much interest that, eventually the news of the find made its way back to Canada where Charlaine Dalpe and Claudia Garneau, now 20, heard about it.

A week later Osin sat down to chat with them in a much more modern way - online via skype.

"Bonjour" he said cherrily before showing them their old note and the crushed green plastic bottle he found it in. The young women leaned in close to the computer to get a better look.

Now, in College Charlaine is studying interior design and Claudia is studying nuclear medicine. They say they remember their message in a bottle clearly, though they never thought it would go so far.