©2009 Full Circle Magazine.
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September 2009 Vol6 No9
Bianca’s Letter
16 June 2002
Dear Mermaids
I hope you like this letter. Maybe some day a mermaid will find this
letter. If you find this, mermaid, treasure it and keep it safe. It shall bring
you good luck! Only mermaids can understand this secret code.
kool retfa ruoy modgnik kool retfa eht aes slamina
ruoy namuh dneirf Bianca
Catherine’s Letter,
Dear Finder
This bottle has been sent to you by Catherine Attridge from
SimonsTown harbour. This bottle shall bring you good luck. Maybe one
day we shall meet. Do not tell anyone of this bottle. Or else you shall
have bad luck.
Peace & Love
Catherine (10 years)
and education platforms for long-term studies
of ecosystems that will provide for incremental
advances in our understanding of ecosystems
and our ability to detect, predict and react to
environmental change’.
The expertise and information Juliette offered
revealed some fascinating possibilities about
how the bottle could have reached the
Mozambican beach on which it was found, and
some amazing insights into the systems that
circulate the oceans around our Planet.
Using data gathered by an experiment
conducted by the then Sea Fisheries Institute
in 1973 (in which a number of ‘drifter cards’
were released, some of them off the South
African coast, to track sea currents, of which
several were recovered a few years later in
Mauritius, Rodriguez and St Raphael, with one
card being found in Kenya and further cards
found on the east coast of South Africa after
three years) Juliette was able to offer a number
of scenarios in which the bottle could have
reached Mozambique.
“Firstly, if the bottle was floating on the
surface it would be likely to have been
influenced by local winds,” explains Juliette. “I
would imagine it got swept out to sea, caught in
the inner side of the Agulhas retroflection
and floated back to the coast in a
recirculation gyre (circular current).
However, this shouldn’t take seven years
and so I doubt it was a direct route.”
“A possibility for the girls’ bottle,” Juliette
continues, “is that it travelled with the
Agulhas Return Current to Australia before
heading back in the South Equatorial
Current. However, a complete trip in this
gyre should take approx 38 months.
“There are a number of other drifter
studies but most drifters have been shown
to follow this route, or else get swept in to
the South Atlantic by an Agulhas eddy, or
filament. I guess there is a remote
possibility that the bottle did a whole tour of
the South Atlantic before getting caught up
in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and
being swept along to Australia and back
into the South Indian Ocean gyre.
“If the bottle remained near the coast
there is a chance that it got caught inside a
trapped eddy, headed northward and then
left the eddy perhaps moving further with
the wind until it got trapped in another eddy.
I believe there are turtles which do this.”
This meant the bottle would have had to
make it past the ferocious and rocky Wild
Coast, which was unlikely.
“The final option,” Juliette concludes, “is that
the girls were playing a trick! I wonder what
sort of condition the bottle was in and whether
any algae survived when it was washed up?”
Well, it wasn’t a trick and when everyone met
at Andre’s home in Fish Hoek, the general
consensus was that the bottle would have
travelled to Australia and back in the three-
year gyre and been deposited on the
Mozambican beach where it has bobbled and
tumbled for the next four years before being
discovered by Tienie.
Evidence of this is borne out by Andre who,
coincidentally, works with ceramics and knows
that the logos and brand-names fused onto
such bottles need to be subjected to harsh and
prolonged abrasiveness to be worn off.
“In effect,” explains Andre, “the bottle has
been sand-scrubbed over many years, which
could only have happened had it been in the
breakers on a beach.”
Andre also discovered on Wikipedia that the
oldest message in a bottle spent 92 years, 229
days at sea. “I couldn’t find anything on the
