A Message in a Bottle is Finding its way Home Three Decades Later

BY MELANIE BUCK –

Despite all odds, a message in a bottle that traveled over 8,000 miles across ‘the pond,’ only to sit on a shelf for more than three decades, will now makes its way back to its owner and will sit in its rightful place in a position of honor. For one Mena couple, a message found in a bottle has been on their shelf since finding it more than 33 years ago. It wasn’t until recently that they decided to take action and find the owner of the note, and with a little luck and a lot of digging, they did just that.

Gordon and Cindy Brevik spent much of their lives in Florida and enjoyed diving in the crystal blue waters as often as they could. “We used to do a lot of diving in dive wrecks and stuff,” said Gordon. As with all divers, they are generally searching under the water, not above, for their treasures. But one day in 1983, Gordon and Cindy would spot something atop the water; something that would take them on a much different type of treasure hunt, three decades later.

Gordon explained, “We are advanced divers and we were out there diving in Sombrero Key, off of Marathon Key. We saw this floating and I got it. It still had the tar on it from the ocean.” Ships leave tar in the ocean and the white plastic bottle was covered in it. Much of the residue is still visible today.

He admitted that, at first, he thought it may be from someone on a stranded island or something of the sort. “I seen a note in there and you know, years ago, you would hear about bottles with notes and so we opened it up and read it. I thought maybe someone was stranded or something. I thought it was pretty neat.”

After retrieving the bottle and looking at the note, this is what they read:

09 SEPT 83

If you find this please return a reply to:

Ronald Herbst

1754 Halsey Ave.

San Leandro, Cal 94578

I am sending this off of the USS Coral Sea CV-43 CATAPULT ONE! We are currently on a World Cruise Deployment.

Please send thes[e] coordinates

N24 8359

W282 88 24

Sincerely,

Ronald Herbst

09 SEPT 83

USS Coral Sea CV-43

“I just put it up and thought a million times about calling the guy,” said Gordon. However, as the years got away from them, neither Gordon nor Cindy had tried to find Mr. Herbst until mid-December 2016.

“A couple of weeks ago, I saw it in my room and thought, you know what, it would be really neat to find that guy. Cindy is like a bulldog and got right on it,” Gordon smiled.

Cindy said, “I Googled the “USS Coral Sea 1983 World Tour” and I came up with the Navy website that showed yearbook pictures. I didn’t know what age group I would be looking for but I found a picture, with his name. I went to Facebook and didn’t find his Facebook account, but it showed me his picture on messenger and [when compared to the yearbook picture] I knew it was him.” She messaged Herbst through Facebook, sent him a scanned copy of the letter from the bottle and their phone number, but hadn’t heard back. Wondering if they had the right Ronald Herbst, they, in turn, found themselves on the other end of the waiting game, wishing for a speedy reply.

Then, on New Year’s Day, they received a message via email. “Cindy, I can’t tell you how excited I was to get your message. It was in my spam folder and I almost missed it completely. I was so thrilled I could barely get to sleep last night,” began the email from Ronald Herbst. Gordon smiled and said, “He was so excited and you couldn’t hardly understand him. He couldn’t believe that over 33 years later that we got a hold of him.”

His email went on to explain that he was deployed on a World Cruise, departing from San Francisco, California in March 1983 before heading to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. “After that, we headed north into the frigid Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia. The Soviets shot down Korean Airliner 007 while we were there so our ship aided in the recovery efforts,” Herbst explained. “Our first port was Korea, which is the place of my birth. I turned 19 years old in Korea. We then headed for Subic Bay, Phillippines, Singapore, then headed to the Persian Gulf where we were within sight of Yemen. We traveled up the Suez Canal and stopped in Naples, Italy, Cannes, France, and finally Rota, Spain. It was sometime after Rota that we tossed the note but I’m not exactly sure where. I believe we were somewhere between Africa and the U.S.” A distance that covers more than 8,000 miles.

Herbst said he actually dropped two bottles into the ocean, but the first was recovered in Miami Beach, Florida in 1983, by a couple on vacation from Virginia Beach. In an ironic twist to the story, Herbst said that when Gordon was thinking in mid-December about finding the owner of the bottle, Herbst was talking to his Sunday School Class about dropping the bottles overboard more than thirty years before. “It has to be a God thing,” said Gordon. Cindy said, “He called us on New Year’s Day and he said that two weeks prior, he had talked about throwing the bottle in his Sunday School Class so they were both thinking about the bottle at the same time. You would like to say it’s a once in a lifetime thing, but it does happen.”

Herbst is more than pleased to learn of the discovery of bottle number two so many years later and is even more excited that the Brevik’s are willing to return it. In fact, Herbst now lives in Pensacola, Florida, home of the National Naval Aviation Musuem and has spoken to them about accepting the bottle into one of their exhibits. It is possible that they will keep the bottle a couple of years or longer for display.

It wouldn’t be the first display in the museum to house a piece of Herbst’s memories. “We shot the last active duty F6 Phantom from our ship and it is in the Naval Museum,” said Herbst.

So this week, the message in a bottle will take one more trek, only this time by land, and not by sea. The Breviks are sending the bottle to Herbst to be entered into the museum, ensuring that this message in a bottle will continue to pique the interests of curious minds.

Look for more on The Message in a Bottle in an upcoming edition of The Polk County Pulse, as we follow its journey back to Herbst and to its resting place in The National Naval Aviation Museum.

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