Message in a bottle brings greeting from the Orient
Thursday, May 08, 2003
By BENJAMIN ROMANO
The Daily Astorian, bromano@dailyastorian.com

Beachcomber's dreams come true for other North Coast residents

The beachcombers, father and daughter, cruised along the sand at Fort Stevens State Park on a clear, calm April evening.

Like others driving up and down the long flat beach that Thursday, they watched the incoming tide for treasures swept in from the sea.

LORI ASSA - The Daily Astorian Inside the glass bottle were notes written in Japanese, Chinese and English, as well as a map of the island of Kodakara.

"I was looking at the water for glass floats," says 10-year-old Alexis Malcolm, "and I just caught it out of the corner of my eye and I was like, `Stop!'"

It was a clear glass bottle with a white cap and three pieces of brittle, sun-yellowed paper rolled up inside. Alexis peered through the glass and read words penned in a neat English hand: "Japan," "Aug. 5, 1995."

MESSAGE CONTENTS

The following is the text of a message in a bottle found by an Astoria family April 10 on the beach at Fort Stevens State Park. The message was printed in English, Japanese and Chinese by Satoshi Ohta (who also drew a smiley face on it). "How wonderful!! Thank you very much for finding this bottle. I floated this from KoDaKaRa Island of the Tokara Islands, Ryu Kyus of Japan on Aug. 5, 1995. "I'm a student of Kagoshima University and major in education. On KoDaKaRa, I'm camping for biological practice and enjoy the beautiful nature of Tokara Islands. In memory of my island life, I made this bottle. "Please let me know where and when did you find this bottle. "Thank you very much."

The message in a bottle Alexis discovered with her Dad, Troy Malcolm, was one of at least five, all from Japan, found by beachcombers in Oregon and Southwest Washington since March.

* On March 7, an experienced beachcomber found a bottle on a beach near Yachats. The message inside was written by a student at Kure Showa High School in Hiroshima and set afloat May 14, 1987.

* On April 6, two hours before low tide, a message in a bottle was found between Waldport and Yachats. The note inside was written by a student at Choshi High School in Choshi-shi, Chiba in 1985.

* On April 18, a surfer south of Newport found a bottle containing a message written Aug. 3, 1998. A 19-year-old student had dropped it in the ocean off an island near Okinawa.

* During the last week of April, a woman visiting the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington found another message in a bottle set afloat in 1987 by a Kure Showa High School student. It was the second bottle from the high school to wash ashore on a Northwest beach recently.

The bottle the Malcolms found on April 10 was launched by Satoshi Ohta, an education major at Kagoshima University in 1995. Ohta was on a biology class field trip to the tiny island of Kodakara in the Tokara Island chain in the south of Japan, near the confluence of the Pacific Ocean and the East China Sea.

"I'm camping for biological practice and enjoy the beautiful nature of Tokara Islands," Ohta wrote.

The tiny island of Kodakara is inhabited by cycad trees, red hibiscus flowers and 37 people. The island chain is reached by an infrequent ferry service and is considered one of the best fishing areas in Japan, according to the Kagoshima Internationalization Council's on-line visitor's guide.

As the crow flies, Kodakara is about 5,050 nautical miles southwest from the North Coast. But the bottles likely followed a circuitous route to get here, according to an Oregon State University oceanography professor.

Jack Barth, an expert in physical oceanography, described the strong Kuroshio Current, which is the Pacific Ocean's analog to the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic. The Kuroshio passes close by the Tokara Islands on its swift course to the northern Pacific. It branches and becomes the North Pacific Current, also known as the West Wind Drift. This current continues east, splitting again a couple of hundred miles short of Vancouver Island. There, one branch goes north to the Gulf of Alaska and the other turns south toward Oregon and Washington.

But it takes a special set of circumstances for a bottle that has made it that far to be washed on shore.

"Since (the bottles) were from different releases, you can imagine them coming across the North Pacific and just sort of milling around offshore in these weaker currents," Barth said.

Strong winter storms generating winds from the south, together with the Coriolis force, generated by the Earth's rotation, cause the surface water to go directly on shore, Barth said. "A series of pulses like that, just like we had this last winter is just what you'd need to sweep things that were resident offshore onto the beach."

Barth said other events - usually a cargo container washed overboard in the North Pacific - can cause more objects to show up on beaches, "but this is unusual because (the bottles are from) so far away and (from) the different years. That's really intriguing."

Troy Malcolm, a commercial crab and shrimp fisherman, has been intrigued by objects he finds at sea for some time. The mantle and shelves in the family home are decorated with green glass floats, large and small, one of which he found 16 years ago. His youngest daughter has inherited his interest, and when he returned from fishing that Thursday last month, they were both eager to go to the beach.

"She said she wanted to find a bottle," Malcolm said. "I was kind of amazed when she found it."

Perhaps he was only "kind of amazed" because this isn't the first message in a bottle Alexis has found. About five years ago, Alexis found another bottle on the beach at Fort Stevens. This one was loaded with 7 cents and a drawing of a lighthouse. Her parents think it was the creation of a little kid who probably tossed it in the ocean somewhere nearby.

"I don't know why I can find them. I'm just a good bottle finder," Alexis said.

Since finding the bottle, the family has embarked on another search. With help from Clatsop Community College - where Mom, Dawn Malcolm, is a student in the Cooperative Work Experience Program - they're trying to track down Satoshi Ohta. Mary Merrill, the program's director, has sent e-mails to Japan's Consul General in Portland, Kagoshima University, newspapers in Japan and a Portland-based Japanese-American newspaper.

Other than an e-mail from the Consul General thanking them for the "exciting news," there's been no word from Japan.

Alexis has lots of questions for Ohta.

"I'm gonna ask him if you want to be pen pals with me," she said.

She wants to know where he works, what grade he teaches (Alexis is a fourth grader at Robert Gray Elementary) and what life is like in Japan.

"He might even have kids your age," Dawn Malcolm tells her daughter.

Alexis' reply: "This is like, pretty exciting."

Susan Wheren at the Newport News-Times and Chris Nielsen at the Chinook (Wash.) Observer contributed to this report.