Card in a bottle story has gone global

Awanui School pupils Charlie Ujdur, Remedy Matthews, Keira Job, Eleigen Cuttle, Destiny Wharewaka Tawhai and Bayley Norman (absent) have accepted the job of finding out the whole card in a bottle story. Photo / Peter Jackson

When Awanui man Ken Ferguson told the Northland Age the story of the Greek master mariner's card he found in a bottle on 90 Mile Beach (Message in a bottle was all Greek to finder Ken, May 11), he was hoping to hear from someone who spoke Greek, so he could talk to the man who tossed the bottle into the sea.

What he got was a flood of text messages and emails from all over the world, as far afield as the UK.

Closer to home, the vice-president of the Greek Community in Auckland offered his services, and a hall in Auckland should be wish to deliver a presentation.

Ken has since made contact with Captain John Karavolos, now retired and living on a Greek Island, by email, in English, but he's delegated the job of researching the whole story to a small group of Awanui School children. They already had a photo of Captain Karavolos' ship pinned to the wall last week, and were pondering the problem of getting the card out of the bottle without breaking it.

Captain Karavolos told Ken he had written the details of where and when he had jettisoned the bottle on the back of the card, but the ink had faded badly, and Ken had not been able to read it through the green glass.

The children might have better luck, but even if it's still illegible they now have dozens of texts and emails to reply to, which seem likely to produce all sorts of information.

Karavolos had told Ken that he had thrown numerous bottles into the sea over the years, and he couldn't be sire when or when he launched this one, but he suspected it was about a year ago en route from China to Newcastle, in Australia.

Meanwhile Ken said last week that the children would be starting their project from Square 1. The second thing they would have to do, after extracting the card from the bottle, would be to locate 90 Mile Beach's Little Bluff, where he found the bottle.