Patrick Dennis said he found a message in a bottle on the shore of Tenerife, a Spanish island off the coast of West Africa, in 2002 and attempted to contact the Newfoundland girl who authored the note.
The letter, signed by 5-year-old Siobhane Riggs, had been tossed into the water off the Nova Scotia coast and made its way across the ocean.
"I felt very very privileged and lucky," Dennis told CBC News. "In fact, the messages were addressed to 'the lucky person.' And I felt very lucky."VOCM.
Dennis called the number on the letter and was told by Carolanne Riggs, Siobhane's mother, that the girl had died in an accident at the age of 6 earlier that year.
"I didn't believe what I was hearing," Dennis told VOCM. "I went from being on top of the world to ... absolute tragedy."
Siobhane's mother and Dennis struck up a friendship,she ended up visiting Dennis and his family in the Canary Islands in 2004 and 2017.
Dennis and his family traveled to Newfoundland this month, taking Riggs up on a longstanding invitation for the families to spend Christmas together.
A message in a bottle is a form of communication in which a message is sealed in a container (typically a bottle) and released into a conveyance medium (typically a body of water).
Messages in bottles have been used to send distress messages, in crowd sourced scientific studies of ocean currents, as memorial tributes, to send deceased loved ones' ashes on a final journey, to convey expedition reports, and to carry letters or reports from those believing themselves to be doomed. Invitations to prospective pen pals and letters to actual or imagined love interests have also been sent as messages in bottles.
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