In September 2012, a young couple capped a romantic date in Newfoundland, on Canada’s eastern tip, by putting a message in a bottle and dropping it into the Atlantic.
“Anita and Brad’s day trip to Bell Island. Today, we enjoyed dinner, this bottle of wine and each other, at the edge of the island,” it said. It asked whomever might find the message to “please call us”, followed by a scribbled number.
Thirteen years later and 2,000 miles away, another couple, Kate and John Gay, found the bottle at Scraggane Bay in County Kerry, on Ireland’s western tip. They read the note, toasted Anita and Brad and wondered: were they still together?
They rang the number but there was no answer. So on Monday night they posted a message on the Facebook page of Maharees Heritage and Conservation, an environmental group that had organised the bay cleanup that led to the bottle’s discovery, and waited.
The post went viral and within hours friends in Canada had alerted Anita and Brad Squires – now married with three children and living in Newfoundland – to the bottle’s discovery.
“It’s been a pretty whirlwind 48 hours,” Brad told the Guardian on Wednesday. “It was Monday night and I was just putting our youngest son to bed and my phone was ding, ding, ding, ding, which was really unusual. Then I could hear Anita laughing in the other room. Her phone was doing the same thing. I came out and she was like: ‘You cannot believe this.’”
The couple, who had been dating for a year before the Bell Island excursion, married in 2016. Anita is a nurse and Brad has just retired as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer.
“We were just young people in love,” Brad told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland show. “We’re now older people in love. We’re glad that the story got out. We’re meeting new friends because of it and hopefully we’ll get back to Ireland soon.”
Martha Farrell, of the Maharees Conservation Association, said the story had prompted other couples in Canada to get in touch to share their own stories of sending messages in bottles across the Atlantic.
