A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22355, 19 March 1938, Page 16

A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA

Bottle Thrown From The Monterey

WASHED UP ON AUCKLAND BEACH

ITHK PRESS Special Service.)

AUCKLAND, March 18.

Awaiting the arrival of the Matson liner Monterey at Auckland was a message to her master, Captain E. R. Johanson, reporting the finding of a message in a bottle cast overboard by him on November 26 last year. The bottle was dropped between Suva and Auckland, and ( had drifted about 300 miles in less than three months before it was found by Mr A. Savage, of Oportere, near Waihi, on the Ohui beach, several miles south of Tairua, Coromandel Peninsula. The message was one of several hundred «cast overboard by the Monterey. On every voyage Captain Johanson said that from 15 to' 20 bottles were cast overboard each day, and he estimated that only about one in 500 were retrieved.

As a means of assisting in the verification of the circulation of ocean currents bottle drifts play a prominent part in the work of charting seas, and the Hydrographic Office of the Navy Department at Washington takes full advantage of the method. In the 16 years in which Captain Johansoh has been in command of various ships he has gained an interesting record of long drifts made by bottles which he had cast overboard. Most of this time he had traded southward from the Pacific coast, and his records show the extent of the westerly drift of the ocean currents northward of the Equator. Probably the longest distance covered by any bottle Captain Johanson has dispatched was one thrown from the City of Los Angeles on a cruise in 1934. The bottle was cast overboard between San Francisco and Honolulu, and was retrieved three years later in the Philippines, after travelling 7000 miles. Other bottles have drifted between 5000 and 6000 miles, including one which travelled from the Pacific coast of Mexico td Tonga. These distances compare well with one of the longest drifts recorded, of 800 Q miles, from Panama to the Celebes Islands, in the East Indies.