Two Bottles: By Hand Or Sea?

What are the chances? Two bottles bearing messages are tossed ashore after a tempestuous late summer storm. They are found one day, and 15 miles, apart (one in Amagansett and one in Southampton) by small children exploring the beach.

With the seas as rough as they were last Thursday and Friday, it's not surprising the waters would yield up a couple of treasures like these.

But what if both bottles originated in Shanghai? That's a long and tangled route to travel. And what if they were dropped into the sea on the same day, by the same person, Wang Zhao-Da, and contained the very same message?

Then what would the chances be?

Find In The Foam

On Thursday the ocean was still rumbling with storm when Susan DeVito walked along Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett with her four children, stepping to avoid errant waves and debris that had come in with the tide. She kicked a bottle out of the foam.

It looked no different from any other Seven-Up or ginger ale bottle - just another piece of garbage, until her son Adam, 8, spotted something inside. It was every young adventurer's dream.

Dear the friend:

When you recieve this letter, you must find that I am from the remote place - China. I am Chinese, I was born on Oct. 7, 1979. I am studying in Ting Chao Middle School, Nan Hui, Shanghai, China. . . .

I like collecting stamps, playing all kinds of balls, swimming. . . . Do you know Chinese? Understand?

. . . I hope you can make friends with me. I am waiting for your letter. I believe this bottle will reach the remote opposite place and I believe you will write the back letter, too. I'm waiting.

. . . The Remote Friend: Wang Zhao-Da

Oct. 7, 1996

Adam, his brother, Connor, 3, and his twin 6-year-old sisters, Emily and Stasia, took the bottle back to their grandparents, Viola and George McClancy, in Amagansett. Mr. McClancy said his first thought was that it was probably a fraud, but he noted the bottle was definitely of a foreign make and suggested that his grandchildren take it to the newspaper anyway.

In Southampton

The next day in Southampton, as Morgan and Rolf Lehman of Meadow Lane walked on the beach with their babysitter, Rebecca Dersteine, they came upon a similar bottle. The children had no way of knowing then, but the message was exactly the same as the one found by the DeVitos the day before.

After The Star E-mailed a Shanghai newspaper, a reporter there confirmed that the letter, at least, was legitimate.

"He put some bottles in the sea a year ago and now is very surprised to be informed of this story," the reporter wrote of Zhao-Da via E-mail yesterday morning. (Zhao-Da does not have his own E-mail address.)

How Could It Be?

So how did both copies make it to the same shore after such a lengthy journey? Did a mariner aboard a trade vessel drop young Zhao-Da's bottles into New York Harbor, where they could easily have been pushed east to the South Fork beaches? Were they tossed to sea at Montauk Point by Chinese tourists on vacation? Or did they truly chance to navigate the high seas by the same route, perhaps tethered together with a piece of cord until the pounding waves drove them ashore this week?

"The most probable route is in a suitcase," Charlie Flagg of Brook hav en National Laboratory said yesterday. Dr. Flagg holds a Ph.D. in physical oceanography and is an expert in world ocean currents.

To reach the shores of eastern Long Island from Shanghai at all, the bottles would have effectively circumnavigated the world almost twice, Dr. Flagg said. And though the chances that the tiny vessels managed to make it from China to these shores were "so narrow as to be implausible," he said, he did offer an educated guess on a possible path.

They would have traveled north from Shanghai via the Kuroshio current into the North Pacific. There they would pass to the south of the Aleutian Islands and journey down the west coast of North America by way of the California current.

They would then head west again along the Equator through the Indonesian Passage and into the Indian Ocean, where they would be carried south somewhere near Madascar and enter the circumpolar current.

Assuming they got that far, the bottles would then move west off South Australia, and past Cape Horn almost to the African coast, but would be caught in the Benguala current in the South Atlantic. Eventually they would have been carried across the Atlantic by the south equatorial current, where they might have drifted west to join the coastal current off north Brazil, and then into the Gulf Stream.

Stands By The Suitcase

"They could have been kicked out of the Gulf Stream, made their way across the slope sea gyre, and then across the Continental Shelf, which is no small feat," and finally ended up on Long Island, Dr. Flagg said.

He recalled a similar bottle story a few years ago in which a bottle found on the California coast had supposedly been let go in the Finger Lakes of New York. He was highly skeptical of the truth in that bottle tale and is of this one too. "Phenomena of this sort, equally unlikely, have occured before, and in both cases I stand by the suitcase theory."

The Lehman children, just 3 and 5 years old, are too young to understand how far away China is, but their father, Robin Lehman, has been puzzling over the bottle's journey all week. "The fact that two were found just 20 miles apart, I find that amazing."

"If it's a hoax," Mr. Lehman said, "they did it very well and more power to them."