The message in a bottle that turned up 30 years later - on Facebook
By Luke Salkeld
From: http://www.dailymail.co.uk
As methods of communication, they are an age apart.
So it is perhaps not surprising that it took over 30 years for Olivier Vandevalle to get a reply to his message in a bottle - via Facebook.
At the age of 14, aboard his family's yacht on a sailing holiday cruising along the south coast of England, he tore a page from an exercise book and wrote a message which he secured in a wine bottle in the summer of 1977.
Blast from the past: Olivier Vandevalle (pictured on the left with his son) and the bottle he threw into the sea when he was a boy of 14 (right, with his father)
Yesterday Mr Vandevalle, a 47-year-old father-of-two from Ostend, said: 'It was so, so long ago that my first reaction when she contacted me was to say "it wasn't me."
Then I remembered.'
He continued: 'There were 12 of us on the boat that day and we were heading for the Azores.
'Suddenly I had the idea of writing a message in a bottle. It's one of those things that every child does at least once.
'Not with the idea of getting an answer but because there's an air of mystery about the whole thing. You have no idea where your bottle will be going.
'Then when you have not thought about the bottle for years and years suddenly this Englishwoman turns up from nowhere and has read your letter. When she e-mailed it to me it all came flooding back.'
The waiter added: 'It was an incredible experience. Where has the bottle been all these years. Was it lying buried under a heap of sand until it was uncovered by a storm? I shall never know.
'But the wine bottle was a safe receptacle for my message. My father insisted that we seal the cork with candle grease to make sure no sea water could get in.'
In the letter he wrote 33 years ago, Mr Vandevalle introduced himself as 'a boy of 14 years and my house is in Belgium'.
He continued to the future recipient: 'I do not know if you are a pupil, a woman or a man.
'I am on a sailing boat of 18 metres. Her name is Tamaris. While I am writing this letter we have just passed Portland Bill on the south coast of England. We left this morning.'
Mr Vandevalle's two sons aged 16 and 20 have tried to copy their dad by writing a message and entrusting it to the seas in a bottle.
'But they were stupid enough not to write their address and consequently the chances of getting a reply are almost nil,' their father added yesterday.
'But the world is full of wonders, so you never know.'
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