Allison Spencer was just a kid in August 1973 when she and her nine-year-old sister Laurie Blair wrote out a wild, made-up tale of being kidnapped by sponge fishermen, stuffed it into a Coca-Cola bottle, and sent it bobbing into the Atlantic off Ocean City, New Jersey. More than five decades later, that same bottle turned up along New Jersey’s coastal wetlands — perfectly preserved, and carrying a message that would eventually make its way back to Spencer, now living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Spencer recalled that her mother had sent her and her younger sister to a beach in southern New Jersey that day with instructions to write a message and seal it inside a bottle, according to WKRC. The note itself, dated to Second Street Beach in Ocean City, declared that it had been “set adrift on August 20th, 1973,” according to CBC Radio. Laurie, playing along with the prank, signed her name to a fictional distress call claiming that “a band of ruthless sponge fisherman are forcing me to dive for them in shark infested waters,” as reported by 6ABC.
The sisters figured someone would find the bottle fairly quickly. Instead, Spencer said she simply stopped thinking about the message for 53 years, assuming it had long since been lost to the sea.
A Wetlands Cleanup Turns Up a Time Capsule
The note resurfaced this year when John Kauterman came across it while clearing debris from New Jersey’s wetlands, finding it in remarkably good condition despite its decades adrift, per the same CBC Radio account. Kauterman is the co-founder of the nonprofit Tidelands Initiative, an organization devoted to picking up trash along the state’s coastal wetlands. He told CBC Radio that stumbling onto old bottles isn’t unusual for him — “I can come across possibly one a week, or one a month” — and separately told 6ABC that it’s common to find glass bottles from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s washed ashore during his cleanups…