Byron Miller found the fishermen who put the bottle in the water in July 2016 by using social media
Recently, Byron Miller was walking on a beach in the Bahamas when he saw something. He was thinking about something.
The vacationer from Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, said, “It can’t be another note in a bottle.”
This was the third bottle he had found on a beach in the Bahamas, on Manjack Cay. But unlike the others, this one was thrown off a boat off the coast of Nova Scotia.
Inside the bottle of wine was a Ziploc bag with a note that had six names and some geographical coordinates on it. Four of the names were written out in full, but the last names of the other two were left off.
Miller used Facebook to find the people who were dropping bottles. He was sure he’d found a match when he saw that several of the names matched people from Nova Scotia.
Miller, who is 54, talked to them and found out that they were fishermen from the southwest part of Nova Scotia. In July 2016, when they were coming back from fishing for cod, they put the bottle in the gully between Georges Bank and Browns Bank.
One of the six fishermen on the boat that day was Pierce Atwood. The fishermen live in Shelburne and Yarmouth counties, which are about 50 km from each other.
Atwood said that they have put other bottles in the water while fishing.
He said that he was surprised that the bottle made it that far without breaking or washing up somewhere it wouldn’t be found.
“Some people would have picked up the bottle and thought it was trash, so it is crazy that this happened the way it did,” he told CBC News in a Facebook message.
Ryan Snoddon, a meteorologist for CBC, said that the bottle probably got a ride on the Gulf Stream, which took it to the middle of the North Atlantic, where it was carried east by the North Atlantic current.
From there, it probably started heading south along the Canary Current in the eastern North Atlantic. In the end, as the bottle got closer to the equator, it would have gone back west along the North Equatorial Current and ended up in the Bahamas.
Miller found his most recent bottle at the north end of Manjack Cay beach. He said that he had found his other bottles at the south end. His past treasures came from a French warship off the coast of Senegal and a ship off the coast of Portugal.
Miller thinks that the bottle didn’t get there until recently because of storm surges from hurricanes like Dorian in 2019 and Ian in 2022.
“Knowing how that went, I can almost guarantee that bottle hadn’t been on that beach before, because if it had, it would have been pushed a lot farther inland,” he said.
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