When Two Beachcombers Found A Message In A Bottle, The Note Inside Gave A Rare Glimpse Into The Past

Candy and Jim are on the beach on most Saturdays, in fact. Typically, the Corpus Christi, Texas-based pair spend that day perusing the sand along the Padre Island National Seashore. And these expeditions reward the couple with natural treasures – such as sea glass, for instance. The bottles they pick up along the way are handy for decorating their backyard fence, too.

This time, however, Candy and Jim happened upon an unexpected gem. Then, after picking up the bottle and taking it home, the two decided to broadcast the moment they finally read the message – enabling their nearest and dearest to revel in their surprise.

Yes, Candy and Jim have often shared their coastal findings with their Facebook friends. On January 19, 2019, they felt, however, that they had something unique to present to their followers. So, the Dukes went on Facebook Live to reveal the object that had caught their eye that morning.

As soon as she started broadcasting on the social media site, Sandy explained her reason for doing so. She said, “We went to the beach today, and, as usual, we always find wonderful treasures... Today, we found a bottle that has a message in it, [and] so we decided to go on [Facebook] Live to open it.”

At that point, Candy and Jim knew very little about the bottle they had uncovered. Nonetheless, Candy showed the item to the camera and described it as best she could, saying, “The bottle’s just a standard, old, white bottle. It has a cork in the top.” Perhaps the most compelling visual detail, however, were the instructions visible from the outside.

As Candy read aloud, the container had an outward-facing message that read “Break bottle.” But the beachcombing couple didn’t want to do that, given their penchant for displaying what they uncovered. Candy explained, “We collect the bottles from the beach, and we have them going down Jim’s fence in the backyard.”

Then Candy and Jim examined the bottle and all of its outward-facing details before cracking it open. They also shared that there was a number inscribed on the receptacle: one that read 002338. This, along with the “break bottle” instructions, had understandably “sparked [the couple’s] curiosity,” according to Candy. She went on, “We just wanted to be able to share with all of you who follow us and all of our... treasures that we find.”

With that, Candy added, “I’m going to let Jim open this little treasure.” So, she handed the bottle over to her husband, who had brought a wine bottle opener. Using this tool made sense considering that the container had been corked and closed. But breaching the bottle wouldn’t be as straightforward as it may have seemed at first.

To begin with, Jim tried to pierce the cork by twisting the corkscrew. Ultimately, though, he felt as though the stopper might be “broken or something,” as it barely budged. Then he realized that it was made of “hard rubber” – a much different material to the traditional soft cork that plugs wine bottles.

So, Candy suggested to Jim, “Maybe you need to stand up and put pressure behind it.” But rising from his seat did little to help Jim get the wine bottle opener to work. To no avail, he twisted the tool all the way into the rubber stopper and started to press down on the wings – a move that would normally release the cork.

When the stopper remained in position, however, Jim came up with a second plan of attack. Explaining his new idea, he said that he would “twist [the wine opener] some more” to see if he could pull the cork out himself. This method proved somewhat successful, too, as pieces of the cork started to break off – although most stayed firmly in place.

At that point, Cindy stated the obvious, saying, “Well, this is harder than we thought.” Even so, she and Jim decided to “keep going with it,” and he re-twisted the corkscrew once again. As Jim worked to open the bottle, his wife joked, “Thank goodness there’s no wine in there. We’d all be crying at this point.”

Fortunately, the couple had yet another tool up their sleeve. Candy introduced what she described as “a handy, dandy antique ice pick,” with Jim ditching the opener to try to remove the remainder of the cork with the long, thin tool. And as her husband worked, Candy seemed to realize why the bottle contained such clear instructions.

The Texan mused, “Maybe that’s why they say break the bottle, because they sealed it really good.” Within less than half a minute, though, she and Jim would finally thwart the hard, rubber cork. Yes, as Jim manipulated the stopper with the ice pick, it started to move. And as victory finally seemed to be within his reach, he exclaimed, “By George, it’s coming!”

Of course, taking out the cork was only half the battle. Candy and Jim would also have to get the letter from the bottle – and doing so through the thin neck of the container would be tough. Jim explained, “They squeezed [the message] down when they put it in, and that put it all the way” into the bottle.

Still, Jim had a game plan: he would pull the papers close enough to “where [he could] get them with tweezers.” And as he worked, Candy began to speculate what the message could possibly have to say. She even grew excited as she imagined the possibilities for her and her husband.

And while Candy’s prediction was a little far-fetched, it wasn’t completely beyond the realms of possibility. She said, “I keep thinking [that] because [the bottle] has a number on it... Maybe we won some grand prize at someplace. Maybe a cruise, I don’t know. I like to think crazy things, but you never know what you’re going to find.”

In response, Jim joked that a south Texas message in a bottle would probably only reward them with “a free taco somewhere.” But, of course, the only way to find out was to retrieve the roll of paper. And Candy wanted her turn at trying to remove the contents.

At first, Candy utilized the ice pick in an attempt to pull the documents closer to the neck of the bottle. Jim suggested she then try the tweezers to get the paper all the way out. But unfortunately for the pair, the tiny pincers ripped a piece off the message. And while watching his wife’s efforts, Jim quipped, “You can see this is not staged.”

Then, at nearly nine minutes into the video – and with still no letter in hand – Candy wondered if the message in the bottle would be “worth all of this.” But the beachcomber spoke too soon, as just seconds after she made that statement, the letter started to give way. She slowly slid it out of the neck of the bottle, finding the paper to be “really, really thick.”

Then, finally, Candy unfurled the message in the bottle and read it aloud to her Facebook Live audience. And at first glance, she noticed that the letter had a space for her to reply. She described, “It has a date, place found, your name and your address, and it has the number on it.”

Next, Candy got to the contents of the message. This read, “Important: this bottle is one of a series released at known locations in the Gulf of Mexico by scientists from the Galveston Botanical Laboratories of the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries.” Naturally, though, a government agency wasn’t releasing bottles into the water just for fun.

The letter clarified the purpose of the experiment, saying, “These releases are part of a study to determine the role that water currents play in the movement of young shrimp from offshore spawning grounds to in-shore nursery grounds.” And as Galveston Botanical Laboratories wanted to know where the bottle had ended up, this explained the spots for the finder to fill in their personal information.

Then Candy chuckled when she read the end of the message, as it revealed the value of the treasure she had found on the beach. The letter concluded, “The person finding this bottle should complete the enclosed postcard and mail it at the first opportunity. A 50-cent reward will be sent for each completed return.”

So, while there may not have been a fortune in store for the Dukes, Candy nevertheless had exciting news to share after the broadcast had ended. She revealed in a comment made underneath the video that she had received “a very exciting call about the bottle.” This contact, as it turned out, had been from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The NOAA had taken the place of the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries – the organization responsible for the message that Candy and Jim had found. And employees at the agency knew precisely when – and how many – bottles had once been sent out into the sea.

A February 2019 article on the NOAA website explained that Candy and Jim’s bottle had been one of 7,863 that had been deployed in the northwestern corner of the Gulf of Mexico. And, astonishingly, the containers had been released between February 1962 and December 1963 – meaning the Corpus Christi couple had found their example more than 50 years after the experiment had been initiated.

In the intervening years, the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries had become the NOAA – although the agency’s offices remained in Galveston. And in 2019 current acting lab director Matthew Johnson revealed to CNN why the 1960s team had wanted to understand shrimp spawning in the area.

Johnson said, “At the time, the shrimp fishery was the largest in the Gulf of Mexico, and this was the first attempt to start managing the species.” He explained, too, that modern fishermen still use what they know about water currents and shrimp nursing grounds to set their harvesting quotas.

And for many years, the message-in-a-bottle technique proved the best way for fishermen to track ocean currents. Decades after these containers are set to sea, then, they continue to wash up on shore. Candy and Jim aren’t the only ones to have discovered such an example, either.

Back in 2013, for example, a man found a scientific message in a bottle on the idyllic coast along Martha’s Vineyard. And the letter inside indicated that the item was a key part of a study by the Coast and Geodetic Survey, which had been using glass bottles to trace ocean currents since the mid-19th century.

The Coast and Geodetic Survey launched its last set of bottles in 1966, when Lyndon B. Johnson served as President and The Beatles’ John Lennon declared the group “more popular than Jesus.” Yet one container remained at sea for 47 years after that, ultimately washing up 300 miles away from its point of deployment on the Aleutian Islands – which dot the northern Pacific Ocean between Alaska and Russia.

Nowadays, experts use different methods for harvesting the same data. According to Johnson, the NOAA and other organizations today rely on drifter buoys. These also bob freely through the ocean, although they come equipped with satellite or radio equipment so that scientists can instantaneously check in from their onshore labs.

And researchers can oversee more than just the buoys’ natural drift through the ocean’s currents. These high-tech devices track everything from water salinity to wave height, and they can be customized at will depending on the information needed.

Yet despite the progress made in this area, glass bottles of a bygone scientific era still float around the ocean. And in Candy and Jim’s case, their container came with a letter and clear-cut instructions on what to do with it once discovered. So, the couple followed the directives included in the bottle that they carefully opened in January 2019.

Yes, more than 50 years after the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries experiment commenced, Candy and Jim returned the postcard that came with their message in a bottle. They filled out the required information – their names, their address and the place where they found the glass container – before sending the form back to NOAA via snail mail.

But were the couple the only ones to comply with these instructions? It appears not. You see, the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries recovered approximately 12 percent – or around 940 – of the containers within a month of them being launched back in the ’60s.

And, of course, the bottle came with a reward, according to the enclosed letter. This promise was honored by NOAA, although Candy and Jim wouldn’t receive a large sum of money in exchange. They wouldn’t be heading off on a cruise, either.

Instead, as Johnson later revealed, he offered the Dukes the original half-dollar prize, which would cost 55 cents to ship and $3 to print on a convenience check. But the couple may not have been too bothered with this meager sum. After all, Candy had labeled the one-of-a-kind find a “wonderful treasure” before she opened it.