A glass Captain Morgan bottle and the message inside found on South Padre Island, Texas. (Laurie Levermann Coker )
Dr. Laurie Levermann Coker usually walks the South Padre Island coast looking for shells and other gifts from the Gulf of Mexico. Recently, however, she found a new treasure: a message in a bottle.
Coker said she often walks along the beach with her two dogs, Ola - which means wave in Spanish - and Nalu - which means wave in Hawaiian. On Dec. 7, the waves delivered a message in a bottle that sent Coker on an internet investigative journey, which continues today.
"I've never found one before, and I've been here for almost five and a half, six years. I've been walking up and down this beach, 2 miles a day and an hour or more, and I pick up lots of things," Coker told FOX Weather.
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Inside the barnacle-covered Captain Morgan bottle was a brief note on lined paper that read, "By Angela (23) and Emily (24) from Keewaydin Island. Sent out 6/15/2024."
The next not-so-treasured moment was when the bottle stunk up her kitchen as the barnacles started dying.
"I let it sit on my counter, and it was so funny because I was in my kitchen. I was like, 'What the heck is that smell?' And it turned out the barnacles were dying. It really smells bad," Coker said.
Coker said she'd never heard of Keewaydin Island but soon learned it was a barrier island like South Padre. Keewaydin Island is a mostly undeveloped island off Southwest Florida between Naples and Marco Island, only accessible by boat.
The glass bottle traveled about 1,000 miles in the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Texas, making it to Coker's beach. However, it was a relatively short journey for a voyage at sea. The bottle could have just as quickly been picked up by the Gulf Stream and carried out into the Atlantic Ocean.
After her Google search results, Coker took to social media to see if she could find Emily and Ashley with very little information to go on.
"On South Padre Island, there are several pages for tourists to come and ask questions or for locals to talk to each other and stuff. I posted it there, and then I thought, well, maybe Naples has the same kind of thing, right?" Coker said. "And so I found one, and I posted on it, and, I got a few responses, and then one of my former students from way back in the 90s saw it, and she said, 'I'm going to put it on TikTok.'"
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Nearly two weeks later, Coker still hasn't been able to use the power of social media to find the people who sent the bottle, but she hasn't given up.
Coker will continue the bottle's journey, but with a few changes, to hopefully hear back from its next recipient. She's adding her own message in both English and Spanish, along with her Instagram handle. Coker plans to take a boat out and throw it back into the Gulf. What happens next is up to the sea.
"Hopefully, somebody else will find it. And I mean, it could just end up right back on my beach, or it could just end up like 6 miles from here down the beach. Or it could end up in North Padre," she said. "I have no idea where it's going to go."