53-year-old message in a bottle leads to bittersweet discovery

Earlier this summer we came here cleaning up the wetlands of Great Lake Harbor and that was when I came across the bottle. This bottle was set adrift August 20th 1973 on 2nd Street Beach Ocean City. It says the band of ruthless sponge fishermen are forcing me to dive for them in shark infested This kid is pranking. This is a good one you know. Well I posted it and it was just a lot of people like went into investigation mode and a gentleman was able to locate the sister Allie who was actually the one who wrote the letter for Lori. She asked for the letter and I was like of course. I was shocked. Obviously 53 years have gone by I had completely forgotten about the note. My nine-year-old sister Lori she came up with that crazy message about being kidnapped by sponge fishermen. She didn't know how to spell all the words so she asked me if I would write it down for her. When I saw the note it was quite a shock to see my handwriting. She had a great imagination she was a theater major in college very creative. She did photography beautiful pieces of jewelry and she passed away in 2017. She had cancer. It was really nice for the note to come back into my life and have a a great reminder of my sister. You know coming out here and doing this work it's all part of our non-profit the Thai Lands Initiative. My buddy Kevin Docherty and I kind of started this up to clean up the wetlands of South Jersey. Kind of growing up here being a I kind of knew that this stuff was out here. I didn't know how bad it was. This is a 1983. 73. 1987. I'll come out here and find like a bottle from the 60s right next to like water drank out of like last week. That's typically where these birds are like coming to nest. You know we're losing a lot of habitat. I think it's kind of important to try to take care of it. I've been doing it now for three and a half years. Just going to continue to work on this area and try to leave it better than how we found it.