A Mom’s Message in a Bottle Obtained 26 Years Later by Her Daughter

Exactly 26 years after it was sent, a message in a bottle was found by a student who goes to school with the sender’s daughter. The message was found in Lake St. Clair in Belle River, Ontario, Canada. This is actually near the area where Mackenzie Van Eyk left the bottle in 1998.

The student who discovered it, River Vandberg, goes to school with Mackenzie’s daughter, Scarlet Van Eyk. She is now the same age her mom was when she sent the message so many years ago. 

The message in a bottle project

In 1998, Mackenzie Van Eyk was in fourth grade at St. John the Baptist Catholic Elementary School in Belle River, Ontario. Her class was asked to write letters about the waters of the Great Lakes, bottle them, and throw them in the nearby Lake St. Clair.

As part of the project, 30 messages in a bottle were thrown into Lake St. Clair. Mackenzie Van Eyk’s teacher, Roland St. Pierre, who assigned the project, said that it was intended to show how harmful plastics are because they don’t break down over time. However, he never would have guessed one of the letters would have survived 26 years.

“It was wild,” said St. Pierre. “I’ve got a lot of ties to this building. I taught 33 years here. It’s close to me. I had forgotten all about it, so it was a real shock. For it to survive 26 years without breaking down, it’s kind of surprising.”

Mackenzie Van Eyk said she remembers the project and has wondered from time to time whether or not anyone ever received her message in a bottle.

“I think that process really stuck with me. This was also right when our school got a computer lab…one of the first things that I ever printed on paper and got to do something with,” said Van Eyk. “It was memorable to do something like that, [leave] something and think maybe someone will find it later.”

Finding and reading the message

River Vandenberg, a kindergarten student at St. John the Baptist Catholic Elementary, discovered the message in Lake St. Clair. Vandenberg discovered the bottle while hopping between sandbars.

“I thought it was a map to kill a grave digger or something,” said River Vandenberg.

River’s grandmother, Michele, suspected that it may have been from a recent school project and contacted the school with the news.

“We sent it to school,” said Michele. “His teacher contacted us later that day and said that was from 1998. I was shocked.”

Scarlet’s current teacher read the letter aloud in class, saving the sender’s name for the end. Scarlet Van Eyk was shocked when she found out who the sender was.

In her letter, Makenzie talked about reading a book called Paddle-to-the-Sea by Holling C. Holling, which was about a little boy who carved a wooden model of a person in a canoe and set it free to travel the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. 

“My mouth completely dropped,” said Scarlet Van Eyk. “And everyone was like, ‘Who’s that? Who’s that?’ And I was like, ‘My mother.’”