What started as a boy's treasure hunt along a beach in Ireland has turned into international fame for nine year old Oisin Millea.
Millea was combing along the shores of Passage East, County Waterford with his mother when they discovered a two-litre plastic green pop bottle with something inside it: A message, scrawled in French, from the past.
The note, perfectly intact and dry as a bone, tells the tale of two girls from Quebec who dropped the bottle off in Quebec's St. Lawrence River with the hopes that it would eventually get discovered by a stranger, reports the Irish Independent. Eight years and 4,000 km across the Atlantic Ocean later, the girls, now in their 20s, have had their wish fulfilled.
Here's the translated message, dating back to the summer of 2004, according to the Toronto Star:
“Hello, we are two girls who had the idea to launch a bottle into the sea. We are called Charlaine and Claudia. We are both 12 and we live in Montreal. We are on vacation in the Gaspésie, in the village of Grande Vallée. We had the idea to launch a bottle into the sea because we saw a TV show about young people putting messages in bottles. If you find our bottle, tell us when and how you found our bottle. Also tell us your name, age, place of residence. Example: Paris, Miami, etc ... To contact us write to us at: cheval-rouge95@hotmail.com”
To finish, if you don’t have Internet, go to a friend’s or go to an Internet café because we are very curious to know if our bottle was found.
Charlaine and Claudia”
Since Oisin's discovery last week, the writers behind the note, Charlaine Dalpé and Claudia Garneau, have been bombarded with requests for interviews from the media in Ireland. Tourism Ireland has also offered to pay for Dalpe and Garneau's travel accommodations for a week in Ireland come the summer of 2013, reports the Montreal Gazette. For Dalpé, now studying interior design at CEGEP, the experience has been unreal.
"It's really special, like something you see in the movies. You don't expect something like this to happen for real," Dalpé told the Gazzette.
As for Oisin, he's just happy with his discovery, says his mother, Aoife Millea.
He's “over the moon because he is quite the treasure hunter. This could not have happened to anyone better,” Millea told the Toronto Star. For now, her son is content with keeping and framing the note and hopes to speak with his new pen pals via Skype later in the week.
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