Sea Mail

In the mid eighties I moved to the Netherlands, a couple of years later my father found a crude toy boat in his workshop which I (or possibly one of my brothers) had made as a child. Having hollowed out the deck he then placed a letter to me, sealed in a glass tube, in the cavity and covered it with an aluminium plate which had my Dutch postal address punched into it. Once the boat had been fitted with a rudimentary plastic sail and painted bright red, it was launched from the coast of Suffolk in a light westerly wind. Speaking with my father on the phone he would somtimes jokingly enquire if the letter had arrived. Then one day, about six months later, the head of a fishing fleet from Urk rang the doorbell of my postal address in Amsterdam (I didn't actually live there). He delivered the letter and the boat! One of his fishing boats had hauled it up in the nets from the bottom of the Northsea on the Dogger Bank, about 130 miles northwest of the Netherlands. I didn't live at my postal address but was "coincidentally" there that weekend. Somebody else opened the door and I only met the "postman" some months later, together with my father whilst he was visiting in Holland. Maybe this story just illustrates the degree of over-fishing in the Northsea. The real wonder is that the boat was seen amongst the seaweed, fish and other debree! The boat is since many years back in my father's workshop, in a glass display cabinet. Footnote: After this first success, a "repeat performance" was organised a year or so later (with a different boat!). It never arrived in the Netherlands but WAS sighted (and briefly taken on board) by a boat servicing oil rigs in more northerly parts of the Northsea. I was sent a letter (and a photo). The toy boat was dutifully set back in the water never (not yet??) to be seen again.