Message in a bottle from a Florida student discovered 16 years later
STUART, Fla. – When Connie Jaynes reached for a bottle she found on the beach near her home on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, she thought she was picking up trash.
But much to her amazement, what she had stumbled upon was a message from the past – a letter written by a Florida elementary student about his life, his family and his teacher more than 16 years ago.
"I just about died," Jaynes said when she learned how long ago the bottle had been sent out into the open ocean.
The bottle was one of about 150 students decorated and inserted messages into as part of a project at Port Salerno Elementary in Stuart, Florida, a coastal city on Florida's Treasure Coast, north of Palm Beach County. Students decorated Pinot Grigio wine bottles and wrote short essays about their lives, interests and school. Some included photos of themselves.
In case the bottles were ever found, each of the letters included the email address of then-fifth grade teacher Tom Gannon. He coordinated the project with school volunteers George and Nancy Marvin, who brought the students' messages with them on their annual sailing trip to the Bahamas. One-by-one, they released the messages into the Gulfstream.
A couple of them were found within a year or two in Bermuda. None had been found for the past 10 years or so, George Marvin said.
That is until Jan. 27, when Jaynes was walking her dog on the beach near her St. Kitts home and she noticed a bottle with paper inside. Its silicone seal was still intact, and there were no barnacles or anything else on it, so she thought it would be a fairly recent message.
"I can walk the beach just about every day, and I do," Jaynes said. "I kind of feel that the message-in-the-bottle thing is the sea saying, 'Thank you.'"
A message from the past
The note was written by fifth-grade student Tyler Neelon, who was about 11 at the time. The top part had faded, but the part of the message he'd written about his teacher was clear.
"My teacher's name is Mister Gannon. he is nice because if you dew (sic) not dew (sic) your home work he gives you more time to dew (sic) it," Tyler wrote. Now 27, he also wrote about his many pets at home, his family and his muscles.
Jaynes saw Gannon's email address and decided to send him a message, much to the teacher's amazement.
News of the bottle's discovery quickly spread on social media, and former students chimed in, recounting fond memories of the project and their former teacher.
"This message might have been for me," said Gannon, now in his 27th year of teaching. "It gives me some inspiration to keep me going."
Neelon, who recently moved to Fort Pierce after about 10 years as a professional bull rider, was excited about the bottle's discovery, and wanted to reunite with Gannon – his favorite teacher.
"He made class fun for us. He was that cool teacher," Neelon said. Gannon was a fisherman and was a father figure to Neelon and his friends, he said.
Neelon didn't remember exactly what he wrote in his message, but he remembered the project.
"It was a big project. We just wrote what we wanted to," he said. He remembers sealing the bottle tight so no water could leak inside. Still, the bottle's discovery was surprising, he said.
"I'm kind of in shock. It's been so long," Neelon said. "It makes me feel so happy."
Tracking the bottle's 16-year journey
The Marvins, who stopped volunteering at Port Salerno about five years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, have since tried to track the bottle's voyage over the past 16 years.
The fun part, Nancy Marvin said, is trying to envision what it encountered all those years.
"You can imagine any scenario you want on how it ended up in St. Kitts," Nancy Marvin said.
George Marvin, a retired Navy captain who is an expert on currents and tides, tried to track the bottle's journey himself.
Did the bottle get swept up in a current that floated it out north toward Greenland? Did it get washed up somewhere in the Caribbean before floating back to the ocean? Did it make multiple circuits around the Caribbean? Without a GPS attached, the possibilities are endless.
"As long as this bottle was at sea, was it floating around here all the time or did it make several circles? We don't know," Marvin said. "That's the cool thing about it."
There's a divergence of several currents – a north and south equatorial current, he said. The bottle probably got picked up by the north equatorial current, but didn't ride it all the way because that current runs well north of the Caribbean.
"At some point it got spit out, maybe the weather, maybe storms, maybe wind, who knows? And it drifted around out here (between Africa and South America)," he said. "And it finally got picked up by the south equatorial current, which is also called the Caribbean current. But eventually that's the current that carried it towards the Caribbean basin."
The interesting thing, however, is the bottle had no growth attached to it, Marvin said.
"So did this bottle get washed ashore some place on its journey and then maybe a storm came with big winds and waves and picked it up and set it back in the ocean," he said. "That could have happened."
Colleen Wixon is the education reporter for TCPalm and Treasure Coast Newspapers, part of the Paste BN Network. She covers school districts in Indian River, Martin and St. Lucie counties.