Message in a bottle found near Haida Gwaii
Credit to Author: Glenda Luymes| Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2020 23:33:56 +0000
“Mom, I’m sorry for the time I made you cry. Mom, I’m sorry for not being the good kid you wanted me to be. Mom, I love you.”
A mysterious message in a bottle, found this summer near Haida Gwaii by a group of seaweed harvesters, has turned out to be a poem to someone’s mother.
The lines, which were written in Indonesian, express sadness and regret:
“Mom, I’m sorry for all the times I did not listen to your advice even though I know it’s for the best,” the poem begins.
“Mom, I’m sorry for being ashamed of what you do even though I know you work hard for me and never complain. I am just an ungrateful kid.”
A group of seaweed harvesters came across the bottle in the summer of 2019 near Haida Gwaii, UBC forestry student Nikki Saadat told Postmedia in an email.
“I have a friend who speaks Bahasa Indonesia and he translated the note for me,” she said.
The note was found by Dafne Isadoro Romero, the owner of North Pacific Kelp. It was translated by Emilio Valeri.
Saadat thought the poem was especially meaningful as Valentine’s Day approaches, describing it as a “love poem about mothers.”
It’s not the first time a bottle containing a message has been found on the Pacific coast. In 2013, a Courtenay man came across what was believed to be one of the oldest messages in a bottle at that time.
Steve Thurber, 53, noticed the green glass bottle with a rusty cap lying in a sand dune near Schooner’s Cove. He could see an envelope inside signed by someone named Earl Willard, dated Sept. 29, 1906. The envelope said Willard threw the bottle into the ocean 76 hours into a journey on the steamer Rainier as it sailed from San Francisco to Bellingham, Wash.
According to the Guinness World Records website, the oldest message in a bottle was found in 2018 in Australia. It was contained in a gin bottle thrown overboard in 1886 by the captain of a German ship.