Cassidy Beach holds up the bottle she found on South Caicos island that Pennel Ames had thrown into the water in 2004 from Nantucket, Massachusetts, April 25, 2023.
Courtesy of Cassidy Beach
Cassidy Beach was part of a research project looking at the invasive lionfish species off South Caicos Island when she decided to go on a hike one day. She’s an incoming senior, studying environmental science and oceanography at the University of Michigan.
Cassidy Beach holds up the bottle she found on South Caicos island that Pennel Ames had thrown into the water in 2004 from Nantucket, Massachusetts, April 25, 2023.
Courtesy of Cassidy Beach
A photo of a book showing ocean current patterns, taken July 30, 2023.
Sara Hassan/The World
The Ameses got help from their two daughters, and for the first response they got back, the bottle had only made it as far as New Jersey.
Pennel Ames holds one of the bottles which he threw into the Atlantic Ocean about two decades ago that was returned to him, Nantucket, Massachusetts, July 30, 2023.
Sara Hassan/The World
“Almost all the replies I've gotten [since then], the note has been in very good shape, you know, 17 or 18 years later,” Pennel Ames said.
The darker bottles also preserved the ink on the notes better if the print was outward facing.
Once the bottles were clean and airtight, they stayed afloat and traveled farther.
The first sign that the bottles were actually going somewhere was when the Ameses got a response from Canada. They then started showing up in Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Spain, Portugal — even the Canary Islands, the Azores and the Caribbean.
Yuleisy Durán Díaz found a bottle in Cuba while fishing out at sea with her then-husband.
“I didn't understand the language, so a friend of mine helped me” to translate it, she said.
Sharon Ames looks through scrapbooks of responses from people who found bottles with notes tossed into the ocean by her husband, Pennel Ames, in their home in Nantucket, Massachusetts, July 30, 2023.
Sara Hassan/The World
Sharon Ames said that after they received a few responses in Spanish, like the one Durán Díaz sent them, they started printing some of the letters in both English and Spanish, and even some in Portuguese.
She added that it’s always exciting getting letters back from people.
“All of a sudden you get an envelope and you go, ‘Oh, wow, I don't know that person. That's a bottle letter.’”
“You get your mail and you kind of know your bills and the familiar people who send stuff to you,” she explained. “But then, all of a sudden, you get an envelope and you go, ‘Oh, wow, I don't know that person. That's a bottle letter.’”
A drawing of Pennel Ames’s boat moored next to a restaurant in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
Sara Hassan/The World
She’s collected all the responses into scrapbooks that have come from all kinds of people. A 9-year-old girl from Florida wrote back. An 87-year-old man from Canada found one while vacationing with his wife in the Bahamas.
“One man in France found it,” Sharon Ames said. “His son then found one of our bottles years later.”
All of the Ameses’ scrapbooks are filled with photos of people with the bottles they found, postcards from their vacations, printed-out emails and handwritten letters.
A handheld bottle corker rests on top of scrapbooks of letters, postcards, emails and press clippings of people who found bottles thrown by Pennel Ames into the ocean.
Courtesy of Sharon Ames
Cassidy Beach holds up the letter she found inside a bottle on South Caicos island that Pennel Ames had thrown into the water in 2004 from Nantucket, 2023.
Courtesy of Cassidy Beach
“As soon as I walked in the cottage, they had a whole dining room table full of letters and books,” Beach said. “They had one book dedicated to France alone. And it was just really cool.”
She’s now back home in Michigan. And the letter from Pennel Ames is framed on her bedroom wall.
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