IT WAS a blast from the past last week for a Collie man who was reunited with a note he threw into the ocean off Albany when he was younger.
Glyn Yates threw the message in a bottle into the ocean in 1980 and last week it was found hundreds of kilometres away on Nine Mile Beach near Eucla. Vanessa and Daryl Nattrass were walking their dog and flying their galah on the beach when they came across the bottle.
“We walked up to the point and Daryl had walked into where all the piles of seaweed were,” Mrs Nattrass said.
“He was walking around rummaging and picked up a green bottle and the note was in that.
“Who knows how long the bottle had been buried in there, It’s a pretty isolated bit of coast.
“We smashed the bottle and read the note.”
The letter read: “Hello. Today is Tuesday 13th of May 1980 and the sun is shining and the weather is fine, in a few minutes I will be throwing this message into the Southern Ocean.
My name is Glyn Yates and I live in Albany, Western Australia. If you happen to find this you are very lucky people.
Over the last two days we have been walking along (indecipherable) beaches looking for messages in bottles but we have been unsuccessful. The wind is bloody cold, but sooner or later we will get warm.”
Mrs Nattrass contacted an Albany newspaper to see if he still had any relatives that may have wanted the letter.
“It turns out he was alive and well and living in Collie, so I got in touch,” she said.
Mr Yates said he was surprised that it had survived so long.
“I don’t exactly remember writing the letter, but when I was a young fella we used to spend quite a bit of time fishing and doing things on the coast,” he said.
“Its pretty amazing, when you actually think about it that whole south coast, It’s a really rocky coast line the chance of it being smashed against rocks or just wedged in rocks is pretty high.
“There is so much of that coast line that is inaccessible, so it is pretty amazing.”
