Messages set adrift in bottles by Collier students showing up years later

Naples, FL Daily News 

Philip Allen's bottle, a student in Scott Barham's 8th grade science class at Oak Ridge Middle School, was found at the beach pictured below the statue at Chesil Beach in the United Kingdom. The bottle was release in November of 2003 and then found on the beach Feburary 6th 2007.

NAPLES — Eight years ago, Collier County teacher Scott Barham and his students put messages in bottles and sent them out to sea.   They weren’t an SOS, but all 300 students hoped someone would get their message.  Barham hoped his students had a little fun and learned something about the Gulf Stream. They still are learning.

Eight years after those first bottles were dropped in the ocean, relics from Oakridge Middle School’s Lagrangian Drift Project still are surfacing.

Barham first thought about the idea while fishing in the Dry Tortugas. He had just seen the Kevin Costner movie “Message in a Bottle.” He put a message in a plastic bottle and threw it overboard.

“It washed up in Texas,” he said. “It was in a plastic bottle, so it was affected by the wind.”

Barham liked the idea of using a bottle to teach his students at Oakridge Middle School how the currents work. He contacted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which put him in

contact with oceanographer Ryan Smith.

It was Smith who suggested that the school participate in the Lagrangian Drift project. Scientists used Lagrangian Drift to study the surface ocean currents.

Barham’s students wrote personal messages on the back of a form letter Barham had written, asking the person who found the bottle to send information back on the date the bottle was found, in what country and the latitude and longitude of the bottle.

“I was in every bottle and the kids were each in one bottle,” said Barham, now a high school teacher in Collier.

The bottles, made of glass and brought in by students from home, had the messages placed inside them and were corked before dropped into the ocean.

“They had to be glass so they wouldn’t float on the top of the water, which would have made it easier for the wind to carry them away from the Gulf Stream,” he said.

On May 25, 2001, Smith dropped the first set of bottles into the water 25 miles off Florida’s east coast off of Delray Beach, during a research trip across the Gulf Stream.

Over the course of three years, Barham’s classes deployed 300 bottles. The first responses, from people finding the bottles along the East Coast of the United States, came about nine months after the first bottle was set adrift, he said.

In an Aug. 14, 2002, e-mail, Amy Newman responded that her 8-year-old son, Jack, found a bottle while playing in the waves during the week of July 4, 2002, in Ocean Isle Beach, N.C.

“That sounds like an interesting project,” she wrote. “If you have a summary of the results that you wouldn’t mind sharing, I am sure that Jack (and his parents!) would enjoy seeing them.”

Three years went by before Barham received responses from Europe, getting five responses from the United Kingdom, Spain and France -- which Barham had to translate using an online translation program.

“This is a project that will pay off for years and years to come,” he said. “There could be bottles out there for 10 years, 15 years.”