Joana Buchan was left shocked after she received a message from a stranger living on a small Norwegian island showing her the handwritten letter that she threw in the sea when she was only 8-years old. The woman who found the letter shares that after finding the bottle containing the message, she searched for Buchan on social media and managed to send her request back in 2020 which she saw only now.
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A unique incident that has led to the discovery of a message thrown into the sea in a bottle sent from Aberdeenshire, Scotland has been found on the shores of Norway 25 years later.
Joana Buchan, who was 8-years old at the time, as part of her school project dropped the message into the ocean. The bottle containing her letter was dropped into the North Sea from a fishing boat off Peterhead in 1996.
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Now a quarter of a century later, the message is found after the bottle washed up almost 800 miles away in Gasvaer in northern Norway.
The bottle was found by Elena Andreassen Haga and she was taken aback by finding a letter written by the schoolgirl inside.
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Reading Buchan's letter, Elena was able to use social media to find the 34-year old Buchan now and who is living in Australia now.
Talking to the BBC, Buchan said: “She sent me the picture of the letter and I was like, ‘that’s my handwriting’ and then when I read it, I just about died laughing.”
Elena spoke about how she found the bottle on the small Norwegian island.
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She said: “We were just having a nice trip and we found this green bottle. It didn’t look very old but you could immediately see that there was something inside.
“We were able to read that this was actually from Scotland, so that was kind of cool.”
Elena also shared that she found the bottle in the summer of 2020, however, Buchan hadn't noticed her friend request on Facebook until recently.
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She said: “This was the summer of 2020, and I sent a Facebook request for Joanna that same summer and she didn’t see it until yesterday, so that’s also a kind of fun part of the story.”
To reach out to her, Elena then sent pictures of the letter to Buchan in Australia, who took some time to remember the event but was quite sure that the handwriting is hers.
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Buchan said she found the "absolute gem of a message" from Elena, dating back to 2020, while scrolling through the message requests section of Facebook Messenger.
"I vaguely remember doing a message in a bottle at Peterhead Central School that we sent off Peterhead in 1996," she added.
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"I was like 'that's my handwriting'."
The letter included details about her "rather big house", and her love of teddy bears.
"When I read it I just died laughing", she said.
"There's some really lovely lines in there, like what was important to me at the time. I wish I could tell my teachers of the time, whose idea it would have been.
"It's clearly done its time in the North Sea."
Buchan added: “The bit that killed me was at the end, I was just like, ‘by the way, I hate boys’.”
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