THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 17, 1996 TAG: 9604170371
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
For days, Rose Stella listened to the weather forecast, waiting for a steady west wind to blow. Finally, on a cold December day in 1994, the wind came.
Stella, then 12, and her family drove from their home in Elizabeth City to Nags Head. And then, from a 21-foot outboard motor boat, about five miles off shore from Oregon Inlet, Stella tossed a bottle into the ocean currents.
Carefully rolled up and sealed inside was a letter she had written to anyone lucky enough to find it.
Last week, 15 months later, Stella received a response - from more than 3,000 miles away.
A teenager named Kristin Johannsclottir, who lives in Hvolsvollur, Iceland, discovered the bottle last month on a beach near Skogar, along the country's southern coast. Kristin wrote that Iceland, an island about the size of Virginia in the North Atlantic, is famous for its volcanoes, geysers and glaciers.
``I've always dreamed of finding a letter like this so I was very glad,'' Kristin said in her letter to Rose. ``I'm so excited about all this, maybe it was a destiny.''
Rose, now almost 14 and an eighth-grader at Norfolk Collegiate, was just as excited.
``I was really thrilled,'' Rose said Tuesday. ``I never dreamed it would go this far.''
Rose's mother, Leslie Stella, said the strong west wind probably blew the bottle into the Gulf Stream off the Outer Banks, and it then drifted north with the current.
The Stella family has done a lot of thinking about such oceanographic matters. Since 1989, Rose and her three siblings have launched more than 20 bottles. They use thick, dark colored champagne bottles and seal them with liquid plastic to protect the paper messages.
One of the bottles apparently bobbed at sea for five years before turning up in the Azores. Another one washed up in Portugal. The family framed a newspaper article from ``The Royal Gazette'' in Bermuda about a Canadian serviceman stationed there who found another of their bottles.
``We always thought it would be neat to find a bottle - but the only way you get mail is to send it,'' Leslie Stella said.
For beachcombers like the Stellas, the prospect of finding a message in a bottle on the beach is akin to finding a pirate's buried treasure. But some are not so romantically minded: Rose said one of her brothers' bottles was found by a volunteer at a federal wildlife agency on the Outer Banks. He sent the boy a brochure on recycling, Rose said.
``They didn't see it as a sport - they saw it as polluting,'' Rose said.
Rose said she plans to mail her new friend in Iceland information about the Outer Banks and Hampton Roads.
And she's already hoping for another good west wind.
``I've talked to all my friends here, and no one had ever heard of anyone throwing bottles in the ocean,'' Rose said, ``and they're fascinated that I would actually get a reply.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by JIM WALKER\The Virginian-Pilot
Rose Stella, 14, an eighth-grader at Norfolk Collegiate, holds the
letter she sealed in a bottle and threw into the ocean off Oregon
Inlet, left. On the right is the reply she received from the girl in
Iceland who found the bottle.
Map\VP
[showing where the bottle was tossed and where it was found]
by CNB