Message in a bottle travels from US to France and sparks friendship

A message in a bottle sent by children in North Carolina has been found by two brothers on a beach in the west of France after two years at sea.

Thiago and Ethan Rouzeau were walking with their father on the beach in Noirmoutier (Vendée) on November 5 after a stormy night when they caught sight of something in the sand.

“I saw something shining, picked it up and pulled the seaweed from it, then I saw it was a bottle with a note inside,” the boys’ father Benjamin Rouzeau told TF1.

“We thought it was a pirate’s bottle,” said his son Ethan.

The boys’ lucky find turned out to be a message from the other side of the world that would put them into the national news.

The note inside the bottle revealed that it was sent in 2021 by a girl called Colbie, a former student at Summit school in North Carolina.

It began:

“Hello! It’s your lucky day! You have found one of our letters in a bottle!”

It went on to give the contact information of the girl’s teacher, Mrs Schambach, who had been using the bottles to teach her pupils about the ocean currents since 2013.

The bottles were then put into the Gulf Stream 60 kilometres from the shore by a sea captain.

“Four different times I’ve just been shocked when there’s an email from abroad that says they’ve found our bottle,” Mrs Schambach told Fox News in 2017.

Since then six more of her bottles have been found across the Atlantic coast of Europe, from Ireland to Portugal.

Mrs Schambach has since retired from teaching but was delighted when Thiago and Ethan spoke to her by a video call.

“Even though this all started as a science experiment, it has ended up as an international friendship,” she told them.

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