Found an Icelander's message in a bottle

"I thought to myself that now I had finally found a treasure," says Erle Tronstad Sagebakken, a fourteen-year-old girl from Lindesnes in southern Norway, in an interview with the local newspaper Lindesnes Avis.

Tronstad was staying in a summer house on the island of Hille, outside the summer paradise of Mandal, not far from Kristiansand, now at the beginning of the Norwegian middle school autumn break, and was walking with her family at a small bay on the south side of Hille when she spotted a plastic bottle between two rocks - an old and worn soda bottle which there was no way to see what soda was in store.

"My aunt Kine always says now let's go treasure hunting, but I've never found any treasure," she tells a reporter from the Lindesnes newspaper.

"Now I know you've found it!"

So she jumped and picked up the bottle, but it turned out to only contain a single handwritten ark, not exactly a treasure - it depends on how you look at it.

"I saw that the letter was in English and took it home." Upon closer examination of the documents there, it turned out to be a letter, dated June 10, 2000, under which Íris Eva signed her name. However, the letter read as follows:

“Hello. My name is Íris and I am ten years old. I am traveling with my family on the [ferry] Norræna, we are on our way to Denmark from Iceland, where I live. My hometown is Akureyri. I hope someone finds the letter in the bottle. Now I know you've found it! Send me a postcard and let me know it's been found."

Tronstad could read the letter and understood the English without any problems, but at the same time thought it remarkable that the bottle had floated across the Atlantic Ocean for 24 years and returned mostly intact to her hands. Intact enough for Iris's letter to be completely preserved.

Now a 34-year-old mother

After all these years, Tronstad wasn't about to send a postcard, but turned to her mother, Lise Tronstad Sagebakken, as the mother is on Facebook - a communication medium that the rest of the world hadn't heard of in the year 2000 when people were sending e-mails to each other and surfing random websites , used chat groups and e-mail lists, and some were even fresh from IRC, the old communication medium that high school and college people were absorbed into in 1994 and beyond.

And lo and behold! Íris Eva was found on Facebook, now a 34-year-old mother of two daughters who still lives in Akureyri. And she remembered the message. "Hi. Yes, my mother and I wrote this on a trip 24 years ago," she replied to Erle's mother, thanking her for getting in touch and letting her know about the discovery of the quarter-century-old message.

Tronstad is happy with her find, even though there was no monetary treasure. She is thinking about framing Íris Eva's letter and putting it on the wall in the family's summer house as a souvenir of the discovery of the bottle message that was launched from the deck of Norræna Ferry on June 10 in the summer of 2000.