When I'm reading the news, it's obviously important to read the main news stories and major headlines, but what I really enjoy are the unique human interest stories. I found this story when scrolling through the lifestyle section of The Boston Globe's website and it caught my eye immediately.
Sean Bercaw is a 51-year-old man who has been sending messages in a bottle since he was 10 years old and living at sea with his family. Since then he has sent out more than 250 bottles and has received responses from 45 different people from places such as Nicaragua, Grenada, the United States, and more. What strikes me the most about this story though is that even as a ten-year-old boy, he was very scientific about what he was doing. He would record the longitude and latitude of where he would throw the bottle, as well as the date, and would request that the person who found it to report back with their location. Doing this has helped Bercaw to track the ocean and its currents.
Bercaw does find what he's doing to be very romantic, but he's not looking for love. He simply enjoys hearing from people and finding out how far a bottle has traveled. As printed on The Boston Globe's website: “Anyone launching a bottle is investing his or her hopes and desires
in the bottle being found,” he says. “The cool thing about it, is it’s not
simply black and white: succeed or fail. Even if no one finds it now, there is
always that possibility. That hope always exists that some one may find it a
hundred years later.”
The article then went on to talk about the history of messages in a bottle, the environmental concerns, and it's relevance in pop culture. Recipients of Bercaw's bottles were also interviewed which made for a very interesting and well rounded article. I also found this article to be quite inspiring and I'm thinking that I might like to send out my own message in a bottle and see what happens.
Link to Article
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