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Message in a bottle

In 1998 Peter Seiter sailed from Azores to New York.



In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and preparing for the worst, Aussie adventurer Peter Seiter penned a farewell note to his family, put it in a bottle and tossed it overboard.

With a sense of foreboding he wrote: ‘The ocean has a personality of its own. The place can be such a peaceful environment to be in, yet it can be frightfully violent. I’ve experienced both.’

Peter's farewell note.

Fearing he wouldn’t make it home, he placed the note – dated June 11, 1998 – in a wine bottle and sealed the cork with wax.
‘I included our GPS coordinates so if anything happened to me, they’d know our last whereabouts when I threw the bottle overboard,’ says Peter, who was sailing
from the Azores to New York to deliver a luxury 46ft yacht and knew the Atlantic could be dangerous.

He also included a 10-deutschmark note with his message, asking whoever found it to use the money to post the letter to his family in the tiny Victorian township of Wunghnu.

Seventeen days later he reached his destination, having survived the rugged seas, but he assumed his message in a bottle had not – until it washed up on shore, a staggering 11 years later!

Recently, American woman Katherine Ginn and a friend stumbled upon the bottle on a deserted beach in the Bahamas.
‘Alongside it they’d found a life jacket and, assuming the worst, smashed the bottle open and spent 24 hours drying it out so they could read my story and write to my family like I requested,’ says Peter, 44.

‘I couldn’t believe it – that after all these years my bottle had turned up in one piece and with its contents still intact.’

Overjoyed, he wrote to the pair, saying he was alive and living in Australia with his wife Karen, 42, and kids Jarred, six, and Sienna, 15 months.

The money Peter put in the bottle to pay for postage.

Katherine posted him his letter, deutschmark, cork and some broken glass from his bottle, placed in a tiny treasure chest as a special keepsake.
‘Words cannot express the joy I felt when I received your letter stating you were alive,’ she wrote.

Peter’s special memento now shares pride of place among photos of his Atlantic voyage.
‘I can’t express what this letter and the old deutschmark means to me,’ Peter says. ‘It gives me a sense of hope and belief. It’s something special to share with my children as they grow up.’

By: Megan Norris
Photos: Lisa Saad