Chloe’s delight over bottle message reply

Ulidia College student Chloe McCormick was not expecting a reply when she sent the message out to sea during a visit to her grandmother’s house at Torr Head, just outside Ballycastle, in mid-November.

However, the 11-year-old had a pleasant surprise when she received a response to her message last week - all the way from the Hebridean Isle of Lewis off the north-west coast of Scotland.

Speaking to the Times on Monday, Chloe’s step-father Roy Willighan said: “Chloe got the idea of putting a letter in the bottle saying who she was, where she was from and things like that and asked for anyone who found it to reply to her granny’s address.

“That was over two months ago and at the time we didn’t even know she had done it; I don’t think she was really expecting a reply.

“Last week we got word that an A4 envelope had arrived at her granny’s house; the bottle had washed ashore on the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis and had been picked up by a local woman, Annie Tempest, who had been walking on the beach with her husband and her dog.

“She’d sent Chloe a whole package with a letter, information about the island, an Isle of Lewis calendar and things like that.

“We made contact with the lady on Facebook and she was apparently very exicted to have picked up the message; Chloe was delighted as well.

“We were just amazed that the bottle had travelled the distance it had; the next stop north is the Faroe Islands and after that Iceland.”