A boat captain from Michigan was well aware of the hidden secrets underneath the water’s surface, but was shocked to find a 95-year-old message in a bottle.
Jennifer Dowker, the owner of Nautical North Family Adventures, was scuba diving in the Cheboygan River on Friday to clean the windows of her glass-bottomed boat when she made the discovery, CNN reports.
"At first I thought it was just a cool bottle and then when I picked it up, when I was still under the water, I could read the word 'this' in the paper," Dowker told the outlet. "It was kind of like 'Holy Smokes! We've got a message in a bottle here. Cool!'"
The note was dated November 1926 and read, “Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow Cheboygan, Michigan and tell where it was found?"
Dowker said she knew a few people with the last name “Morrow” in the area, so she posted to Facebook in hopes to find a rightful recipient.
"I figured we'd track it down pretty quickly and that'd be the end of it," she said. "So I kind of forgot about it because it was already late that night ... and went to bed."
In the morning, the post had gone viral, and shared more than 100,000 times.
"What was going through my mind was where am I even going to find the time to do the research to find the person," Dowker said. "I'm a single mom running a small business with three teenage boys."
On Father’s Day, Dowker heard from George Morrow’s daughter, Michele Primeau. Primeau, who’s not on Facebook, received a call from a stranger who had seen Dowker’s post and decided to track to her down.
Primeau recognized her dad’s handwriting, and said he must have been about 17 or 18 when he wrote the note.
"I can just see him going out and doing that because it was his birthday," Primeau said. "I don't know for sure. But it just sounds like something he would have done."
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Her dad died in 1995, and she said the discovery has brought back a lot of good memories.
"So he's been gone a long time, but it was kind of cool because all this happened on Father's Day weekend," she said.
Primeau plans to frame the letter in a shadowbox, which will be hung on the boat or in the company’s gift shop.
"I thought the right thing to do would be to give it to her," Primeau said. "She found it and that would keep my dad's name living on."
Primeau said she's planning to make the trip up to Cheboygan to see her father's letter in September.
Dowker said, "I told her 'you have a lifetime pass on the Yankee Sunshine.'"
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