In September 2012, a young couple capped a romantic date in Newfoundland, on Canada’s eastern tip, by putting a message in a bottle and dropping it into the Atlantic.
“Anita and Brad’s day trip to Bell Island. Today, we enjoyed dinner, this bottle of wine and each other, at the edge of the island,” it said. It asked whomever might find the message to “please call us”, followed by a scribbled number.
Thirteen years later and 2,000 miles away, another couple, Kate and John Gay, found the bottle at Scraggane Bay in County Kerry, on Ireland’s western tip. They read the note, toasted Anita and Brad and wondered: were they still together?
They rang the number but there was no answer. So on Monday night they posted a message on the Facebook page of Maharees Heritage and Conservation, an environmental group that had organised the bay cleanup that led to the bottle’s discovery, and waited.
The post went viral and within hours friends in Canada had alerted Anita and Brad Squires – now married with three children and still living in Newfoundland – to the bottle’s discovery.
“The last 24 hours have just been awesome – knowing the story is appreciated by so many people,” Brad told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland show on Wednesday. “We were just young people in love. We’re now older people in love. We’re glad that the story got out. We’re meeting new friends because of it and hopefully we’ll get back to Ireland soon.”
The couple, who had been dating for a year before the Bell Island excursion, got married in 2016.
Martha Farrell, of the Maharees Conservation Association, said the story had prompted other couples in Canada to get in touch to share their own stories of sending messages in bottles across the Atlantic.