Summary The message, dated August 20, 1973, said the bottle had been thrown into the sea from Second Street Beach in Ocean City
(Web Desk) - A message in a bottle tossed into the sea by a nine-year-old girl 53 years ago has been discovered during a cleanup operation in a marshy area of New Jersey.
John Couterman, co-founder of the Tidelands Initiative, found the sealed bottle while carrying out a routine cleanup in a marsh in Upper Township. Inside was a humorous note written by a nine-year-old girl named Lori Blair.
The message, dated August 20, 1973, said the bottle had been thrown into the sea from Second Street Beach in Ocean City. Written in a playful tone, the note claimed that the girl had been kidnapped and taken to an island off the Atlantic coast, where ruthless "sponge fishermen" were forcing her to dive into shark-infested waters.
The note asked whoever found the bottle to send it back to her home address, jokingly suggesting that the discovery might have saved her life.
Hoping to locate the girl who had written the message, Couterman shared a photograph of the note on social media. The post eventually reached Lori's sister, Alison Spencer.
Spencer revealed that Lori was nine years old when she wrote the message, while she was 16 at the time. She said Lori dictated the note to her because she had better handwriting.
The two sisters then threw the bottle into the sea from the Ocean City beach, never expecting it to resurface more than five decades later.
