'Miracle' message in a bottle connects B.C. pair with newlyweds halfway around world
Canadian couple who found the bottle on Haida Gwaii share eerie similarities with German couple who sent it
A mysterious message in a bottle that washed up on the remote shores of a beach on British Columbia's Haida Gwaii during the Christmas holidays has connected two couples halfway across the world.
Christine Cunningham found the bottle on Dec. 23 while looking for scallops that wash up on the shores of Rose Spit, a 16-kilometre spit of land in the northeast corner of Haida Gwaii.
"I just went for a beach comb, looking for glass balls and that sort of thing," Cunningham said. "You never know what treasure you're going to find."
At the edge of some sand dunes, Cunningham found a perfectly preserved glass bottle.
"The glass was in perfect shape, no scratches, no barnacles, no moss, no algae. It was like kind of perfect."
She took the find home to open, and carefully pulled out a printed note. The note — repeated in Spanish, English and French — said the bottle marked the occasion of the wedding between Christine and Nils Polster in northern Germany in 2011.
Cunningham was amazed.
"My name is also Christine, which is hers, and they were married on the same weekend in 2011 as my husband and I," she said.
Excited, Cunningham called up the Polsters, who run a violin-making and restoration company in Egestorf, Germany.
They were equally delighted.
"We never thought we'd get a message back because five years, we thought, that's it," Christine Polster said. "The [bottles] are drowning."
Sixty guests attended the Polsters' wedding and she believes half the guests wrote messages in bottles. A friend of the theirs who works on a container ship took the 25 to 40 bottles to drop in the ocean.
This was the first bottle to be found.
"We just don't know where our friend threw it in the water," Polster said.
"It wasn't the North Sea, but we think he kept it on a big container ship and he threw it maybe in the South Pacific."
She also marvelled at the eerie connection between the couples.
"It's a miracle," Polster said.
Cunningham said she found it hard to stop talking about her newfound friend.
"There's some neat coincidences there and when we were talking, I felt as though I knew her," she said.