Canadian “message in a bottle” girls visit Waterford

The two Canadian girls behind the message in a bottle which was found washed up in Passage East, Co Waterford, last October, have met the school boy who found it.

Last year, schoolboy Oisín Millea found the mystery message in a bottle, which had been tossed into the Atlantic Ocean in Canada in June 2004, by two 12-year-old friends while on holiday in Grande Vallée, Québec.

The girls included their names – Charlaine Dalpé and Claudia Garneau – as well as a plea to contact them if the bottle was ever found. Their message, dated July 6th, 2004 and written in French, was discovered by Oisín while he was out "looking for treasure" on the beach in Passage East.

Although the girls left the note in a plastic Sprite bottle, the note was perfectly intact and bone-dry after making its way out of Quebec, past Newfoundland, across the Atlantic, and up the Suir estuary before ending up in Passage East.

Tourism Ireland in Toronto, Canada tracked down the girls, now grown up, through both traditional and social media, and invited them to visit Ireland as part of the year of the Gathering.

Charlaine, Claudia and their partners have spent a week here and visited Dublin, Cork and Waterford. Yesterday they paid a visit to Oisín at his home in Passage East.