A North Sea fisherman has set a world record by scooping up a bottle that has carried a message in the ocean for almost 98 years.
The bottle, found east of the Shetland Island off Scotland’s northern coast, was among 1,890 released all at one time in a government experiment to map the undercurrents of the seas around Scotland, the BBC reports. Only 315 have been found.
Fisherman Andrew Leaper, skipper of the Copious, found the bottle — which was set adrift in 1914 — in his nets in April.
Guinness World Records confirmed on Thursday that it is the oldest message in a bottle ever recovered, beating a previous record by five years, the BBC says.
Oddly, the old record was set by Leaper’s friend, Mark Anderson, who had found his bottle in 2006 while on board the same vessel, the Copious, the BBC reports.
Leaper says Anderson is “very unhappy that I have topped his record.”
“He never stopped talking about it — and now I am the one who is immensely proud to be the finder of the world-record message in a bottle,” Leaper says, according to the BBC.
Inside each bottle, a postcard asks the finder to record details of the discovery and promises a reward of a sixpence, the AP reports. Unfortunately for Leaper, the coin no longer exists.
The Scottish government says adrift bottle 646B was released on June 10, 1914, by Capt. C. H. Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation, as part of a batch of 1,890 scientific research bottles specially designed to sink downward and float close to the seabed.
“By tracking the location of returned bottles, it was possible for the undercurrents of the seas around Scotland to be mapped out for the first time,” the government said in a statement.
It says the water-tight glass bottles contained a postcard asking the finder to record the date and location of the discovery and return it to the “Director of the Fishery Board for Scotland” – with a reward of sixpence available. It says Brown’s original log is now held by Marine Scotland Science in Aberdeen and is updated each time a discovery is made.
