Finding a message in a bottle brightened Kaua’i’s recent stormy weather for visitors Tom Nash and his wife Amy.
The couple from Port Angeles, Wash. were beachcombing near Kamilo Point makai of the Lihue Airport runway Sunday. The green glass champagne bottle was discovered in a pile of sticks and logs on the rocky shoreline.
The couple were with Kapa’a resident Sherry Olkonen and on a hunt for Japanese glass balls.
“It’s our most memorable find,” said Tom Nash, who is a veteran beachcomber. “I knew it was old because I could see the 22-cent stamps inside.”
Nash said he and his wife enjoy beachcombing along the coast near their home in Port Angeles on the North Bend of the Olympic Peninsula, across from Victoria, British Columbia.
“We’ve never found any glass floats, but lots of bottles,” he said. “On the Washington Coast lots of Japanese garbage washes up, you never know what you’re going to find.”
Back on Kaua’i the beachcomber from Washington couldn’t wait to take the bottle home to remove its tightly sealed topper and instead smashed it open on a large basalt beach rock.
Inside he found a dollar bill, circa 1987, two letters and a self-addressed stamped envelope.
The carefully worded letters showed the bottle was plunked into the ocean on September 25, 1987 near Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California. The letter was signed by Alan Schwartz from the research and development department of Texceed Corp., a dental technology company based in Irvine, Calif.
According to the text of the letter, the bottle was apparently an experiment in bronze coatings.
Schwartz described the bottle as: “A champagne bottle purged with non-toxic Freon 12 vapor, closed with its polyolefin stopper, sealed with epoxy resin, and topped with a rubber boot. It was coated with a thin layer of atomized bronze in acrylic resin to retard the growth of marine life that might sink the bottle by increasing its weight.”
A search on the Internet for Texceed showed the company had been sold to a Missouri firm in 1994. The firm was unable to provide a contact for Texceed or Schwartz.
The bottle appeared freshly landed on the windward Kaua’i coast. If so, the dark green semi-opaque champagne bottle took quite a circuitous route before landing.
The definitive book on glass floats is “Beachcombing for Japanese Floats by Amos L. Wood,” published in 1971 by Binfords & Mort in Portland, Ore.
Wood writes that experiments have shown an open ocean drift of about four to five miles per day for a small float set off from the coast of Japan into what’s known as the Kuroshio, or Japanese, Current. The actual daily speed is subject to the current and storm patterns of the various sections of the North Pacific.
To beach and get out of the current requires a chance storm, like the one that struck Kaua’i Saturday night.
If the Nash’s champagne bottle is a recent arrival it could have traveled over 20,000 open ocean miles before finding land just north of Nawiliwili Harbor, with drifts past places as far away as the Philippines and the coast of Japan.
The Nashes are still awaiting word about Schwartz, but will go home with a very unique Kaua’i souvenir.
