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Letter in a bottle found 19 years later

Howe Sound
letter
A scanned copy of the letter that was sealed in a bottle and tossed in the sea 19 years ago.

A letter sealed in a bottle and thrown overboard from a ferry during a Langdale to Horseshoe Bay run 19 years ago has recently been retrieved, not far from where it started its voyage.

Jill Skabar contacted Coast Reporter recently to say the letter in a bottle had been found by an unnamed woman on Pasley Island, about eight kilometres from Langdale.

Skabar’s sons Quintin and Sedrick (then aged five and three) threw the letter in a bottle overboard on May 19, 1997 after a visit to their grandmother’s house in Gibsons.  

“My parents live up on the Coast so we visited sometimes,” Skabar said.

“My mom always said, ‘you should try putting a letter in a bottle,’ you know, just jokingly because I think she did it once when she was a kid.”

The suggestion was enough for the two boys, who enlisted their mother’s help in writing a letter and sealing it tightly inside a pop bottle.

“My husband said, ‘you know you can get in trouble for throwing something off the ferry,’” Skabar recalled.

“We didn’t get caught, though.”

The letter said, “To whoever finds this bottle … if you get this, write us a letter to let us know how far the bottle travelled,” and included the boys’ address in Port Coquitlam.

The woman who found the bottle recently contacted Quintin, now aged 24, on Facebook to let him know she had retrieved it.