Chance Harbour woman finds N.S. girl who sent bottle message

A Chance Harbour woman is getting to talk to a girl who sent a message in a bottle that travelled from Nova Scotia.

Natalie Tapley has been watching a lot of debris wash up on the beach near her home lately, most of it garbage. Two weeks ago she organized a clean up after finding some hundreds of pounds of seaweed mixed with garbage on the beach.

A week later her husband Eric found a message in a bottle that's turned her into a bit of an amateur detective.

“He’s pointing at the ground with a big ‘ol grin on his face,” she says. “And he says, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ So I went up beside him and looked and I said, ‘Well blow me down, it’s a message in a bottle.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

Tapley says the bottle had a cork in it and the note was written in pink marker.

Dated July 18, 2014, the message simply read: “Hi my name is Kaylee. I’m from Long Island, N.S. Please write me back at B0V 1G0”

“She had to obviously go to the trouble to get a cork for that pop bottle. And it was dry as a bone, I mean she couldn’t have packaged it any better than it was. In perfect shape,” Tapley says.

Armed with that limited information, Tapley turned to things like Google maps and online friends. It was a friend from Scotland who narrowed the girl's location down to Tiverton, N.S. and found a place called Fisherman’s Needle Guest House. Following up by phone turned into a dead end.

Tapley figures the note writer was too young to think about putting a phone number on the message.

“I think she’s quite young and it’s a good way of protecting yourself I think and if you really want to write me back, you gotta find me. She’s doing really well with this if that was the whole point of it all,” she says.

Finding Kaylee turned into a social media movement with people from Scotland, Ontario and Florida all searching on line.

Tapley says it is worth the effort.

“Here’s the thing with messages in a bottle, people are fascinated by them," she says. "There’s this romantic thing that gets wrapped around a message in a bottle, I think there’s been movies and books written about it and whatnot and I think for younger people and a child it’s a big thing and I don’t want to just ignore her. She went through the trouble. She probably has a huge imagination.”

Late Wednesday afternoon Tapley tweeted she was able to find Kaylee and will be talking to her.

She would like to exchange pictures as well.