MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE FOUND

Rob Herbst of Pensacola, Florida, tossed two bottled messages overboard into the Atlantic Ocean when he was a 19-year-old Naval petty officer in 1983. “I am sending this off of the USS Coral Sea CV-43 Catapult One! We are currently on a world cruise deployment,” he wrote on the enclosed notes. Then … nothing, for 34 years. Until he recently received a message on Facebook from a couple in Arkansas: “Were you by any chance on the USS Coral Sea in 1983,” Cindy Brevik wrote. Amazing story, no? Only the actual story is this: Cindy Brevik found the bottle back in 1983, soon after Herbst tossed it in the ocean. The bottle, with the message, spent the next 33 years as a conversation piece at their home and in classrooms. Gordon Brevik told the Pensacola News Journal, “I’m glad I kept it all this time because it made for a better story than if I’d contacted him back in 1983.”
* Not necessarily.
* A conversation piece? And what exciting, scintillating conversations they were, too!
* “Hey, where’d you get the bottle with the note?”
“Found it.”
“You gonna tell the guy who sent it?”
“Some day, maybe.”
* What was this Cindy Brevik doing swimming alongside an aircraft carrier?
* So the actual story is, “Hoarder finds bottle tossed by litterbug.” But that’s not as romantic.
* She found it in 1983? What did the guy do? Toss the bottles over in port?
* She’s lucky the bottles didn’t hit her when he tossed them.
* Just another case of a Florida citizen spreading wacky news to the world.
* This could have been one of those romantic comedies but now everyone’s too damn old.