Q&A: Message in a bottle from 1983 found on Sable Island

CBC

03-06-2025

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A Parks Canada archaeology technician on Sable Island recently found a message in a bottle that contained a note and an old Canadian $2 bill.
It happened in mid-May on the sliver of land about 300 kilometres southeast of Halifax. Parks Canada says a message in a bottle is usually found once a year on the island — give or take.
Sarah Medill is an operations co-ordinator for Parks Canada on Sable Island. She spoke to CBC's Information Morning Cape Breton. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us the story of this message in the bottle.
In mid-May, Mark Doucette — an archaeologist out here working on another project — found this bottle in the area where they were working, and he brought it back to the parks team and we brought it back to the station.
And so we tend to make a little bit of a deal when we find things like this on the island and invited everybody who was here. So I think there was about eight people on the island at the time to come for the opening and the unveiling.
You make it a bit of a thing?
We do make it a bit of a thing. It's always kind of an exciting find because you never know what's going to be inside or what the message is going to be.
Let's start from the outside. Tell us about the bottle and what kind of shape was it in when Mark found it?
You could actually still recognize it as a Gordon's gin bottle. And so it still had sort of the embossment of the name on it but like a lot of the bottles on Sable Island — they don't break because there's no rocks on the island or around the island. They come up intact, but they do get quite sandblasted.
It was a little hard to see into the bottle, but you could definitely tell that there was something inside it. And they had screwed the cap back on and then sealed it up with electrical tape. And even that was still relatively intact, so the condition was pretty good.
What was in it?
When we opened it up, there was definitely a rolled-up note and in the rolled-up note was also a Canadian $2 bill … Actually, the first thing you noticed when you opened it, you could actually still smell the gin.
Really?
Yeah, it still had a very alcoholic aroma to it. And unfortunately the gin also made some of the writing on the letter that they wrote a little hard to make out. And so some of the letters were missing, but we were able to eventually make out that one side said "We're from the crew of the Wimpy Seahunter supply ship" and then it provided a date. So they set it ashore sometime near Sable Island on Jan. 14, 1983. "Congratulations" was written on [the note] as well … on getting your two dollars.
Where did they set it adrift?
Well, it would have been somewhere around Sable Island, it implies anyway. So a supply ship around that time, there was offshore oil and gas platforms on the island. So this was probably a resupply ship for those or a support ship.
So that bottle has been around for 42 years with that message in it?
Exactly.
I wonder how long it's been on the island, because the sand fills in and comes off, right?
Yeah, it does. And who knows, it could have come ashore fairly recently or bobbed around for a little while shortly after they released it.
The sand will sometimes bury things and then other storms will expose them again. The area where the bottle was found was on the north side of the island. So when you think of Sable Island, you kind of imagine it as a big smile and a crescent shape. And so the north side of the island is on the inside of that crescent and it sort of almost acts as a basket for catching things out of the ocean. So it's sort of mixed in with a lot of other stuff.
So do you know anything about that? What did you say the name of the vessel was?
So it was a little hard to make out originally because the W was missing and what turned out to be a P was sort of written looking like an R. So initially we were like looking at the IM ray Seahunter. But then once the note dried again, it was still a bit damp with the leftover gin. You could see the impressions for the W and some searching online, we did see that there was a boat called the Wimpy Seahunter that was in the area in the '80s, early '80s.
You said there have been other finds like this?
We find a message in a bottle about once a year on the island, give or take. And in the last probably 10 years, we've had one that was set adrift as early as in the 1930s. And that was from a boat that was travelling from somewhere in the U.K. to North America. And the person who wrote the message sounded like they were moving from Scotland to somewhere in North America at the time. It was written on the ship's sort of information sheet, so that was fairly interesting too. And it was the vessel, I believe it was called the Caledonia. And so that was only found probably six or seven years ago and but you know, sent to sea in the 1930s.
What's another one?
We had a group of maybe Grade 6 students in Massachusetts that set a bottle adrift with just little hellos and messages, and we think that was maybe a school project just to see if something was returned.
What are you gonna do with your $2 Canadian bill?
As far as I know, I think the archaeologists took the note in the bottle and the $2 bill back with them. It'll probably go to archives for a bit anyway.