This bottle –

With this drawing –

Was found very close to where it was launched. But according to its finder, it sat there for almost three years. Tossed into Bear Cut in December 2012, found November 2015. A nice little mention of it here by a coastal cleanup group.

I suppose it’s possible that it only traveled a few hundred yards before being wedged into some rocks, but I think we can agree that this is the most probable route that the bottle took:

That’s really just what seems most likely. And how amazing that it landed in almost the exact same place as where it had been launched!

It was found by someone who has been swimming off Virginia Key for 40 years. I used to take very long swims off Virginia Key as well when I lived in Miami. It felt wild and abandoned there because there were no amenities and there was no easy access to the beach. But one could always find weird things and weird people there. I wrote about this area in a previous post. It was a good representation of the bizarre mash-ups that occur in South Florida, and I have no doubt the raccoons there were responsible for this piece I made years and years later…