What Are The Odds...?

Only a child's faith would allow him to believe this bottle would ever be found!

It only seems fitting then that the bottle be found by another child! I guess that ol' Neptune has a soft spot for the wishes of the children. Or it could be that a beautiful mermaid decided to help out and guarded the bottle during it's 24 year journey?

No matter how it happened, this reads like something in a child's book of high sea adventures!

Message in a bottle answered 24 years later

Associated Press
March 29, 2011, 3:08PM

MOSCOW — Nearly a quarter-century after a German boy tossed a message in a bottle off a ship in the Baltic Sea, he's received an answer.

A 13-year-old Russian, Daniil Korotkikh, was walking with his parents on a beach when he saw something glittering lying in the sand.

"I saw that bottle and it looked interesting," Korotkikh told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "It looked like a German beer bottle with a ceramic plug, and there was a message inside."

His father, who knows schoolboy German, translated the letter, carefully wrapped in cellophane and sealed by a medical bandage.

It said: "My name is Frank, and I'm five years old. My dad and I are traveling on a ship to Denmark. If you find this letter, please write back to me, and I will write back to you."

The letter, dated 1987, included an address in the town of Coesfeld.

The boy in the letter, Frank Uesbeck, is now 29. His parents still live at the letter's address.

"At first I didn't believe it," Uesbeck told the AP about getting the response from Korotkikh. In fact, he barely remembered the trip at all; his father actually wrote the letter.

The Russian boy and the German man met each other earlier this month via an Internet video link.

I wish more things in our everyday lives worked out like this story, but sadly they don't. Most of the time, the bottle would get broken, or would leak water and sink, or would meet the fate of so many ships in the past...and just disappear for good!

Nice to know that sometimes the impossible happens, and the outcome is good!

How about coffee on the patio this morning! Just cool enough to be comfortable!