WTNH News Channel 8 / News / 1999

	Pupils' message in a bottle answered _ an ocean away (North Stonington-AP) _ Fourteen months and one ocean later, a message from Jeanne Robbins' first-grade class got through. The North Stonington Elementary School class participated in the Coast Guard Ice Patrol program that invites students to write messages, seal them in a bottle and send them out to sea with a Coast Guard patrol. Their bottle was dispatched along with a buoy that monitors ocean currents and tracks icebergs. The students, now second-graders, learned last month their message turned up on the Canary Islands. A resident of Lanzarote, a small, one-road island off the northern tip of Morocco, found the students' juice bottle and wrote a letter of reply. "When I got the letter, I jumped up and down and said `Oh, my gosh, we got a letter from the Canary Islands," said Robbins. "It was just so exciting." It was also a first for the Coast Guard division out of Groton. The program is 14 years old, but a note had never been recovered from a bottle shipped out of Groton. "We dropped the monitoring buoy in the Labrador Current, and it probably went south for several hundred miles and then mixed with the Gulf Stream and shot across the ocean," said Coast Guard Cmdr. Steve Sielbeck. Today's News Page. WTNH Home Page. ©1999 WTNH/WTNH-DT A LIN station.

Pupils' message in a bottle answered _ an ocean away
(North Stonington-AP) _ Fourteen months and one ocean later, a message from Jeanne Robbins' first-grade class got through.

The North Stonington Elementary School class participated in the Coast Guard Ice Patrol program that invites students to write messages, seal them in a bottle and send them out to sea with a Coast Guard patrol.

Their bottle was dispatched along with a buoy that monitors ocean currents and tracks icebergs.

The students, now second-graders, learned last month their message turned up on the Canary Islands. A resident of Lanzarote, a small, one-road island off the northern tip of Morocco, found the students' juice bottle and wrote a letter of reply.

"When I got the letter, I jumped up and down and said `Oh, my gosh, we got a letter from the Canary Islands," said Robbins. "It was just so exciting."

It was also a first for the Coast Guard division out of Groton. The program is 14 years old, but a note had never been recovered from a bottle shipped out of Groton.

"We dropped the monitoring buoy in the Labrador Current, and it probably went south for several hundred miles and then mixed with the Gulf Stream and shot across the ocean," said Coast Guard Cmdr. Steve Sielbeck.

Today's News Page.

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