Miracle of the message in a bottle: Heringsdorf friendship across the Atlantic!

Miracle of the message in a bottle: Heringsdorf friendship across the Atlantic!

In an exciting story about friendship and discovery, Jörg Wanke from Heringsdorf and the American Clint Buffington recently crossed the borders of the Atlantic. Thanks to a message in a bottle that Wanke threw into the sea almost ten years ago, the two of them found each other. Ostsee-Zeitung reports that Wanke dropped his bottle into the water between Madeira and the Canary Islands at the end of October 2015 while he was on a cruise with his family.

The bottle, which traveled an astonishing distance of almost 6,000 kilometers, was found by Buffington on an uninhabited island in the Bahamas a few weeks ago. During a 30-minute video call, the two men were able to talk about their love for the message in a bottle. Buffington, a musician from Utah, has found over 140 messages in a bottle in recent years. Incidentally, the bottle he found was his second blue bottle, which he discovered on his discovery tours.

An unexpected contact

Buffington found the bottle while walking on the beach with his father and decided to use social media to find the sender. Thanks to a report in the ZDFheute was able to establish contact with Wanke. The Wanke couple, who spontaneously decided to write the message in a bottle one beautiful evening, are happy about this unexpected contact across the pond.

Wanke, who works as a pilot and regularly travels to the USA, sees the message in a bottle as a small miracle. “It's great that a piece of paper we threw into the water could travel so far and now lead to this friendship,” he says. He and his wife have even thrown a new message in a bottle from the Heringsdorf pier into the Baltic Sea. It remains exciting to see whether this suffers the same fate.

The fascination of messages in a bottle

Message in a bottle has a long, fascinating history. Scientists began exploring the sea with these courier trips as early as the 19th century. How Deutschlandfunk Kultur reports that the physicist and polar explorer Georg Neumayer started a larger message in a bottle project in 1864 to explore ocean currents. At that time, 6,500 bottles were released and over 600 responses helped create the first flow maps. Today, messages in a bottle not only represent science, but also personal adventures.

The stories of messages in bottles and their finders still captivate many people. Whether it's a poem to a stranger or a message to the world, the idea that someone in another part of the globe will come across this little bottle makes the message in a bottle a very special means of communication. The friendship between Wanke and Buffington is a modern example of the magic of the message in a bottle that has transcended generations.