Boat captain Jennifer Dowker finds 95-year-old message in a bottle in Michigan.
She was shocked to find a message in a bottle written in 1926. What did the message say?
The following written content by Sara Powers
(CNN) – Boat captain Jennifer Dowker runs shipwreck tours all summer long, so she knows that there are all sorts of secrets hidden under the surface of Michigan’s waterways, but she was still shocked to find a message in a bottle written in 1926.
Dowker is the owner of Nautical North Family Adventures and was scuba diving in the Cheboygan River on Friday to clean the windows on the bottom of her glass-bottomed boat, the Yankee Sunshine, when she made the discovery.
She has a small collection of bottles and other odds and ends she’s collected while diving, so the old-fashioned green bottle caught her eye. It was sitting on the bottom of the river about 10 feet underwater, she told CNN.
“At first I thought it was just a cool bottle and then when I picked it up, when I was still under the water, I could read the word ‘this’ in the paper,” Dowker said. “It was kind of like ‘Holy Smokes! We’ve got a message in a bottle here. Cool!’”
When she got back to the surface, Dowker showed the bottle to her first mate and a potential diving client, who had been watching her from inside the boat.
She said the bottle was about 2/3 filled with water and still had part of a cork inside, but its seal had deteriorated over the years.
She was able to fish out the note with a small tool and gently unrolled it to read the message.
The note was dated November 1926 and read:
“Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow Cheboygan, Michigan and tell where it was found?”
Her first mate, Rob Hemmer, works at a local museum and his co-workers said to put the letter in the freezer to dry out, Dowker said.
Dowker said Cheboygan is a small town and she knew a few Morrows lived in the area, so she posted pictures on her company’s Facebook page and hoped that a handful of people would see it.
“I figured we’d track it down pretty quickly and that’d be the end of it,” she said. “So I kind of forgot about it because it was already late that night … and went to bed.”
When she woke up Saturday morning, her post had gone viral — it has now been shared more than 100,000 times and has more than 6,000 comments from people offering tips, or who just wanted to know more about the story. Read more from 62 CBS Detroit.
