Dr. Laurie Leverman Coker usually walks the South Padre Island coast in search of shells and other bounty from the Gulf of Mexico. However, she recently discovered a new treasure: a message in a bottle.
Coker said she often walks the beach with her two dogs, ola — which means wave in Spanish — and nalu — which means wave in Hawaiian. On December 7, Waves delivered a message in a bottle that sent Coker on an Internet investigative journey that continues to this day.
,I’ve never met anyone before, and I’ve been here for about five and a half or six years. “I’m walking 2 miles and an hour or more every day on this beach, and I pick up a lot of things,” Coker told Fox Weather.
Inside the barnacle-covered Captain Morgan bottle was a brief note on the lined paper that read, “By Angela (23) and Emily (24) from Keewedin Island. Sent 6/15/2024.”
The next unforgettable moment was when the bottle stinked up his kitchen as the barnacles started to die off.
“I put it on my counter, and it was so funny because I was in my kitchen. I said, ‘What kind of smell is this?’ And it turned out that the barns were dying. It smells really bad,” Coker said.
Coker said he had never heard of Keewaydin Island but soon learned it was a barrier island, like South Padre. Keewaydin Island is a mostly undeveloped island in southwest Florida between Naples and Marco Island, accessible only by boat.
The glass bottle traveled nearly 1,000 miles from Florida to Texas in the Gulf of Mexico to reach Coker’s Beach. However, this was a relatively short voyage at sea. The bottle could be immediately picked up by the Gulf Stream and carried to the Atlantic Ocean.
Following her Google search results, Coker took to social media to see if she could find Emily and Ashley with very little information.
“On South Padre Island, there are several pages for tourists to come and ask questions or for locals to talk to each other. I posted it there, and then I thought, Well, maybe there’s a similar thing in Naples, right?” Coker said. “And so I found one, and I posted on it, and, I got some responses. Found, and then one of my former students in the ’90s saw it, and she said, ‘I’m going to put this on TikTok.'”
Nearly two weeks later, Coker still hasn’t been able to harness the power of social media to find the people who sent the bottles, but she hasn’t given up.
Coker will continue the bottle’s journey, but with a few changes, in hopes of hearing back from the next recipient. She is adding her message in both English and Spanish along with her Instagram handle. Coker plans to take a boat out and toss it back into the bay. What happens next depends on the sea.
“Hopefully, someone else will find it. And I mean, it could end up right on my beach, or it could end up 6 miles down the beach from here. Or it could end up in North Padre,” she said. “I don’t know where it’s going to go.”
