A World War II-era message in a bottle that traveled from a Navy training beach in Virginia to the Tampa area was apparently uncovered by Hurricane Debby. Suzanne Flament-Smith tells the Washington Post that she spotted the corked glass bottle with a handwritten letter inside while she was cleaning up debris on a trail in Safety Harbor last week. She says she opened it with her family that evening and found a bullet casing, sand, what appears to be a mini-cannonball, and a letter dated March 4, 1945, with the letterhead of the US Navy Amphibious Training Base in Little Creek, Virginia.
The faded letter, which in parts is hard to read, is from somebody called Chris, or possibly Jim, to somebody called Lee, People reports. It begins: "Dear Lee, Received your letter yesterday, was glad to hear from you. So you got a little lit up the other day. Well that is a every day thing around here. They have a bar and they have pretty good beer." Later, the writer mentions that he is going to "radio school," which "seems to be a lot of fun." He promises to write again the next day. Flament-Smith posted a photo of the letter on Facebook, hoping to find relatives of the writer and the intended recipient.
It's not clear why the letter was in a bottle. "Was he on a ship?" Flament-Smith wonders. "Did they throw it from the Navy base?" The New York Times notes that if the bottle floated on its own from the base almost 800 miles away, it would have had to float down the East Coast for hundreds of miles before making its way up Florida's western coast. The base on the letterhead, which is now called the Naval Amphibious Base at Little Creek, trained more than 360,000 Navy, Army, and Marine Corps personnel during World War II. Flament-Smith says it would be wonderful to give the bottle's contents to a relative. "I think it would be such a cool circle," she tells People. "It's like human history in tangible form." (More message in a bottle stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
