One December day Abraham Carimoney, 13, was walking to school on the remote Chilean island of Laitec, when he spotted a brandy bottle in the sand. Inside, he found a message from an Australian boat captain named Matt Jensen, who is probably the world’s biggest message-in-a-bottle enthusiast.
“I am interested in the ocean — in ocean currents,” read the letter. “I would like to hear from the person who finds this message. I’m offering a small reward.”
With help from one of his teachers, Abraham replied to the message, which had traveled more than 6000 miles to reach the Chilean coast. A surprised Jensen responded expressing his joy at receiving a reply, telling the young Chilote he would like to visit the island one day.
“Abraham was really surprised,” his teacher said. “Everyone on the island is talking about it: The other children imagine that Matt might visit Abraham and take him on a trip, or maybe that he will arrive with gifts.”
Crisscrossed with unpaved roads and pastures, the Chiloé archipelago is one of the most remote places in Chile. To arrive at Laitec — a two-mile-wide island near the archipelago’s southern tip — Jensen would have to take two ferries, one from the mainland and second from Chiloé’s largest island. Though the archipelago boasts 16 churches on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites, many of its residents live in poverty and lack adequate access to healthcare.
What are the chances that anyone would actually find a bottle tossed out to sea? According to Jensen’s investigations, they are actually pretty good, about 10 percent. The ship captain has sent out around 2000 messages in his fanciful study of the sea, and more the 200 have been recovered by someone.
Some, like the one Abraham found, cross the globe to be found years later while others wash up much sooner and much closer to home. Jensen tossed his first message into the Great Australian Bight only for it to be found a month later in Victoria. Once, bottles he dropped in Australia’s Bass Strait and Fiji turned up on the same beach in Queensland, 100 meters from one another.
”It’s all about the romance of the sea,” Jensen told The Sunday Morning Herald in 2011. “The way the currents work. The people in faraway places. Where did the bottle wash up? How did it get there? Will anyone pick it up? What sort of life does the finder have?”
He said that he is very particular about the discarded bottles he uses for his messages. He prefers old Brandy bottles, or something else “romantic and old-looking.”
By Henry Clayton Wickham (
The Santiago Times
