Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

New Jersey Family Connect With ‘Aoife’ in Ireland Who Threw Message in a Bottle Out to Sea

27th August 2023
A message in a bottle that was thrown into the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland in 2019 and found over four years later on a New Jersey beach
A message in a bottle that was thrown into the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland in 2019 and found over four years later on a New Jersey beach Credit: Frank and Karen Bolger

A family in New Jersey who found a message in a bottle from Ireland have connected with the woman who wrote it after the story went viral.

Frank Bolger says his wife and granddaughter found the bottle while litter picking on the beach in Wildwood, New Jersey on 17 August.

Speaking to RTÉ’s Morning Ireland last week, he relayed that the message was written by someone who identified themselves only as Aoife, with no contact information, and was dated 17 July 2019.

Part of the message reads: “Maybe it’s travelled down to Africa or to Iceland. I won't know if someone found this, but I hope it’s found.”

The Bolgers’ appeal to connect with the mysterious message writer moved a lot faster than the bottle did across the Atlantic Ocean, as Aoife Byrne discovered during the week.

The Bray woman connected with the Bolgers on social media and together they joined CBS News Philadelphia to share their remarkable story.

Published in Coastal Notes
Afloat.ie Team

About The Author

Afloat.ie Team

Email The Author

Afloat.ie is Ireland's dedicated marine journalism team.

Have you got a story for our reporters? Email us here.

We've got a favour to ask

More people are reading Afloat.ie than ever thanks to the power of the internet but we're in stormy seas because advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. Unlike many news sites, we haven’t put up a paywall because we want to keep our marine journalism open.

Afloat.ie is Ireland's only full–time marine journalism team and it takes time, money and hard work to produce our content.

So you can see why we need to ask for your help.

If everyone chipped in, we can enhance our coverage and our future would be more secure. You can help us through a small donation. Thank you.

Direct Donation to Afloat button

Coastal Notes Coastal Notes covers a broad spectrum of stories, events and developments in which some can be quirky and local in nature, while other stories are of national importance and are on-going, but whatever they are about, they need to be told.

Stories can be diverse and they can be influential, albeit some are more subtle than others in nature, while other events can be immediately felt. No more so felt, is firstly to those living along the coastal rim and rural isolated communities. Here the impact poses is increased to those directly linked with the sea, where daily lives are made from earning an income ashore and within coastal waters.

The topics in Coastal Notes can also be about the rare finding of sea-life creatures, a historic shipwreck lost to the passage of time and which has yet many a secret to tell. A trawler's net caught hauling more than fish but cannon balls dating to the Napoleonic era.

Also focusing the attention of Coastal Notes, are the maritime museums which are of national importance to maintaining access and knowledge of historical exhibits for future generations.

Equally to keep an eye on the present day, with activities of existing and planned projects in the pipeline from the wind and wave renewables sector and those of the energy exploration industry.

In addition Coastal Notes has many more angles to cover, be it the weekend boat leisure user taking a sedate cruise off a long straight beach on the coast beach and making a friend with a feathered companion along the way.

In complete contrast is to those who harvest the sea, using small boats based in harbours where infrastructure and safety poses an issue, before they set off to ply their trade at the foot of our highest sea cliffs along the rugged wild western seaboard.

It's all there, as Coastal Notes tells the stories that are arguably as varied to the environment from which they came from and indeed which shape people's interaction with the surrounding environment that is the natural world and our relationship with the sea.