Finder of message in a bottle on Texas island plans to continue its ocean journey
Dr.Laurie Levermann Coker usually walks the South Padre Island coast looking for shells and other gifts from the Gulf of Mexico.
Recently, however, she found a new treasure: a message in a bottle.Coker said she often walks along the beach with her two dogs, Ola – which means wave in Spanish – and Nalu – which means wave in Hawaiian.On Dec.
7, the waves delivered a message in a bottle that sent Coker on an internet investigative journey, which continues today.“I’ve never found one before, and I’ve been here for almost five and a half, six years.I’ve been walking up and down this beach, 2 miles a day and an hour or more, and I pick up lots of things,” Coker told FOX Weather.Inside the barnacle-covered Captain Morgan bottle was a brief note on lined paper that read, “By Angela (23) and Emily (24) from Keewaydin Island.
Sent out 6/15/2024.”The next not-so-treasured moment was when the bottle stunk up her kitchen as the barnacles started dying. “I let it sit on my counter, and it was so funny because I was in my kitchen.I was like, ‘What the heck is that smell?’ And it turned out the barnacles were dying.
It really smells bad,” Coker said.Coker said she’d never heard of Keewaydin Island but soon learned it was a barrier island like South Padre.Keewaydin Island is a mostly undeveloped island off Southwest Florida between Naples and Marco Island, only accessible by boat.The glass bottle traveled about 1,000 miles in the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Texas, making it to Coker’s beach.
However, it was a relatively short journey for a voyage at sea.The bottle could have just as quickly been picked up by the Gulf Stream and carried out into the Atlantic Ocean.After her Google search results, Coker took to social media to see if she could find Emily and Ashley with very little information to go on. “On South Padre Island, there are several pages for tourists to come and ask questions or for locals to talk to each other and stuff.
I pos...