.jpg?trim=0,0,0,0&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800&w=696&resize=696,0&ssl=1 "Lovers message in a bottle found 13 years later and 2,000 miles away")
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A message tossed into the Atlantic nearly 30 years ago by a Canadian couple washed up on the shores of Ireland’s Scraggane Bay this week.
When Brad Squires, 40, threw a bottle off the cliffs of Bell Island 13 years ago, he and his then-girlfriend Anita, now 35, doubted it would even reach the ocean, let alone survive the journey across the Atlantic.
“Today we enjoyed dinner, this bottle of wine, and each other on the edge of the island,” the couple wrote in the bottle message about their picnic date. “If you find this, please call us,” they added, providing a phone number but never imagining somebody actually would.
But on July 7, Kate and Jon Gay, members of the local charity Maharees Conservation Association, found it during a beach cleanup on the Dingle Peninsula. They brought it to a group meeting later that night, where they smashed it to reveal its contents.
“It’s a moment of pure joy,” Martha Farrell, chair of the Maharees Conservation Association, told NBC News. “For us, it’s the impossibility and resilience of that glass bottle finding our beach all those years later — but also the resilience of the couple.”
The Squires married in 2016, settled in Newfoundland, and share three children and now, their remarkable love story with the world. They had only been dating for a year when they penned the message and were long-distance. He was a police officer in British Columbia, and she was a nursing trainee in Newfoundland.
The finders called the number in the letter but got no answer, so Farrell made a Facebook post, expecting it might take weeks to find the author. But one hour later, Anita Squires responded, confirming she had written the note.
“It was phenomenal,” Farrell told the outlet.
Anita added, “For all the stars to align, for all those things to happen, it seems like an impossible feat for that little bottle, but it was pretty resilient.”
Adding to the story’s serendipity, the bottle was found in the Maharees, a coastal area in Ireland facing erosion from climate change, much like parts of Newfoundland.
The Maharees Conservation Association hopes to use the discovery to connect with Newfoundlanders facing similar challenges, and Anita plans to help.
“They have a soft coastline, they have a sand dune system, and they are also vulnerable to sea level rises,” Farrell said. “It’s a somber enough affair when you’re thinking ‘How can we actually prepare ourselves for what’s to come?’ So to have this little moment of pure joy in the middle of that, it was very welcome.”
Anita called her love story “cute” but also credited the conservation group’s efforts to protect coastlines from climate change. She said that connecting these campaigners is “the beautiful thing at the end of the story.”