4-year-old finds ‘treasure’ on Scotland coast. It was a 2012 message from Canada
On the northern coast of the Isle of Mull in Scotland, a 4-year-old in blue rainboots set off on an adventure.
Hamish, a Tobermory native, was with his mother, Grace Lambert, baby brother and a family friend when they wandered a few miles from home to Glengorm, a “beautiful coastal estate,” at the end of March, Lambert told McClatchy News in an email on June 27.
Hamish “absolutely loves being outdoors,” his mother said, with a particular affection for the sea and led the way as they checked pockets of ocean water trapped in the rocks for critters and fish.
“After a morning of rockpooling we started to head toward the back of the rocky beach,” Lambert said.
Then they noticed something sticking out from the long grass of the coastline, unnaturally tucked into the landscape.
It was a bottle — with something inside.
“It was amazing that it hadn’t smashed on any of the rocks,” Lambert said. “When we got home we opened the bottle and there was a rolled up piece of paper inside.”
The piece of paper described the Drift Bottle Project, a project 25 years and thousands of miles in the making.
The project was started in 2000 through Canada’s Institute of Ocean Science, and aimed at better understanding the currents on the surface of the ocean and how they move water across the planet, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
Over the past two decades, multiple research crews have dropped bottles, with information on the project inside, into the ocean around northern Canada, Alaska and Canada’s west coast, eventually expanding to the Panama Canal and the Bahamas, according to the department.
About one in every 25 bottles dropped is found, the department said, and most are found within a year or so from being dropped.
Except for Hamish’s discovery.
“Our drift bottle was found almost 13 years after it was released!” Fisheries and Oceans Canada said in a June 24 Facebook post. “Research scientists out of our Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia, with help from the crews of the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Louis S. St-Laurent released 21 drift bottles into the Labrador Sea in 2012 as part of the Drift Bottle Project. It has been over a decade since a bottle from this mission was found — the other four that came back to us washed up in England and France a year or two after being released.”
Lambert said both she and Hamish’s father, Joe, Tobermory’s deputy harbor master, are marine biologists, so they worked to try and contact someone from the project to report the find.
The project’s founder had since retired, she said, but eventually they were able to connect with Sarah Zimmerman, an oceanographer with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Lambert said.
“(Sarah and the founder) were both amazed that the bottle was found after (13) years, and that it was in such good condition,” Lambert said. “Sarah let us know that the bottle we found was part of a group of 21 bottles launched together into the Labrador Sea from the Canadian Coast Guard ship the CCGA Louis S St-Laurent in 2012. She said that this bottle was launched by the helicopter pilot, which Hamish thought was really cool.”
In a comment on the Facebook post, Lambert said, “Hamish was disappointed it wasn’t a pirate treasure map,” but his excitement increased when he saw how his parents reacted.
“I think our enthusiasm rubbed off on him a bit,” Lambert said. “We showed him a map of where the bottle came from and explained why it was important to study the ocean currents.”
The Labrador Sea is a portion of the northern Atlantic Ocean between Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and Greenland, meaning the bottle had to cross the Atlantic to reach the Isle of Mull, traveling thousands of miles.
A few months after his discovery, Hamish’s excitement hasn’t died down.
“Now he regularly asks to go back to Glengorm to check if any more ‘treasure’ has washed up,” his mother said.
The Isle of Mull is on Scotland’s west-central coast, about a 130-miles drive northwest from Glasgow.