BOTTLE FROM HOBART

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 November 1933, Page 3

BOTTLE FROM HOBART

PICKED UP AT KAREKARE. After a journey of at least 1500 miles right across the Tasman Sea, a bottle containing an address which was put in the water in January, 1932, was picked up on Karekare Beach. On January 21, 1932, Mr. L. W. Johnsen, of Sandy Bay, Hobart, dropped a bottle containing his address overboard from the Zealandia in longitude 148.5 degrees cast and latitude 41 degrees south, and on the 12th of last month he received a letter from Mr. E. T. Fairburn, of Titirangi, that he had picked up the bottle on the beach at Karekare, near the Manukau Heads. Mr. Johnson evidently communicated with the Hobart. “Mercury” newspaper, for an account appeared in that journal on Saturday, October 14: “The letter stated .... that the bottle did not appear to have been .there long,” said the article, “as it was not frosted by the action of the sand •. • If it had drifted in a straight line it would have covered about 1500 miles, but I think it would have been swept down below the south of New Zealand, then up the West Coast, when it would have covered, perhaps, 300 miles. If it has been the full 21 months on the journey . . . taking the distance as the crow (lies, it would have travelled at the rate of one-tenth of a mile an hour, but . . . the extra distance covered would increase the rate of progress considerably.

“Incidentally there is a surprisingly large number of bottles, light globes, etc., strewn on the coast where I found your ‘empty,’ so it may explain where all Aussie’s ‘empties’ go.”