Message-In-A-Bottle Mystery
Posted June 28th 2021
Imagine Mike Dolan’s surprise one early June morning when he was cleaning up the area around his home in Avalon Manor that sits on the South Channel. “I noticed some weeds and things,” he says. “That’s when I noticed the bottle. I thought that it was kind of neat, so I called out to my wife, ‘We have a message in a bottle!’ ”
A message in a bottle? How exciting! What exotic destination might it be from? How far had the ocean carried it? You can probably imagine what was going through their minds. So, they carefully uncorked the bottle and retrieved their treasure: a note, a treasure map, and even a little pirate booty was inside the bottle. According to the note, the bottle was set adrift by a gang of pirates. The pirates from Stone Harbor, N.J.! Stone Harbor? You mean this bottle drifted around for a year and only went from Stone Harbor to the other side of Avalon? But who are these pirates?
Mike Dolan followed the directions on his letter very carefully and we can report – mystery solved. He heard from one of the pirate leaders … Beverly Thompson, of Bucks County and Stone Harbor. It seems the Thompsons celebrate a “pirate’s weekend” every summer in Stone Harbor with their grandchildren. They have been doing it for 11 years. The festivities include dressing up like pirates, searching for treasures and taking their boat out in the back bay to send off their message in a bottle. “It’s fun for the kids,” Thompson was saying recently – we are not sure exactly where she was calling from, maybe a desert island somewhere? “And we get a great response from our neighbors and people around town.”
Thompson and her pirate grandchildren had pretty much written off this bottle. After all, it had been a year. And they normally hear back sooner. Maybe this one was out in the South Pacific? “We were surprised that it only went as far as Avalon in a year,” Thompson adds. “And we had already done our pirate weekend this year.”
So, mystery solved. But you should still keep your eyes peeled for any pirates wandering down 96th Street. |
