Five years after the Australian family of the Elliotts found Englishman Paul Gilmore’s 50-year-old message in a bottle, they finally met.
In 1969, Mr Gilmore — the same age then as 13-year-old Jyah Elliott — was on a ship from England travelling toward Melbourne, Australia and threw a message in a bottle overboard. It was found 50 years later by then nine-year-old Jyah, who was digging in sand dunes (沙丘) at Talia Beach on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula in 2019.
“We went down to Talia to go fishing and Jyah was walking around in the sand dunes and found a bottle,” Jyah’s dad Paul Elliott said. “We couldn’t get it out … so Jyah broke the bottle.” In the bottle was Mr Gilmore’s Melbourne address and a request for whoever found it to get in contact (联系). “I just saw a date there, 1969, and thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty old’,” Mr Elliott said. The Elliott family at first sent a reply to the stated address but got no answer.
Four years after landing in Melbourne and having “a wonderful time in Australia” a 17-year-old Mr Gilmore had to return to England to care for his grandfather and grandmother, who had fallen ill. When news the bottle had been found made its way back to Mr Gilmore, who is now living in Yorkshire in England, it was “quite surreal, like a dream”, he said. “It all comes from the bottle that I dropped in the Indian Ocean somewhere towards Melbourne when I was 13 years old, so that’s quite a while ago,” the 67-year-old said. “I was always hopeful someone would find it, but I had no idea.”
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