"I was very surprised because the letter was addressed to my two children and their friends. However, only their first names were on it. Our address was also misspelled," says mother Julia Gogos. The family could not trace the airmail from faraway New Zealand at all, which made it all the more surprising and, above all, astonishing that the letter contained the seven-year-old bottle post.

"I assumed that the bottle would get caught in a bush somewhere in Mondorf - maybe it would have made it to the Netherlands," says the 42-year-old with a laugh. But that the post would drift all the way to New Zealand: unthinkable. She says the family quickly forgot about the message. It had been thrown into the Rhine without the family getting their hopes up that they would get a response. "The message we had written on the slip of paper was, in retrospect, somewhat amateurish. Had we known that it would make such a long journey, we would have made more effort," said the mother of the family. "I had already forgotten the message in a bottle, I was five years old then," says Maja. Silas, seven years old at the time, still remembers that they had closed the bottle very well.

One can only guess the route the bottle traveled from Bonn to Auckland (18,000 kilometers as the crow flies). "If you look at pictures of the ocean currents, you can already visualize a route around Africa," explains Ulrich Callies, a currents expert at the Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Schleswig-Holstein. Sea currents are "strongly driven by the weather", the expert explains, so they can always change. "So it is not implausible that the drifting bottle manages to change from one vortex to another," says Callies. The bottle could have drifted to the equator on the west coast of Africa, then further along the east coast of South America and finally east towards New Zealand. "It could have been that way, but it doesn't have to be," the expert says. The bottle also first had to make its way from Bonn towards the North Sea. It was a mystery that could never really be solved, according to Callies. The plastic bottle was so light that it protruded out of the water and was therefore driven by the wind.

Now the family in Germany wants to locate the people who found the bottle in New Zealand, because they did not leave an address or a surname. All the Gogos family knows is that their names are Scott, Julia, Lea and Alice Joy. The father, Christian Gogos wrote a post on Facebook on Tuesday evening, in which he says he is searching for the finders of the message in a bottle. By Monday afternoon the post had been shared 772 times and commented on 115 times - also by many New Zealanders. "At least three-quarters of the Kamelle (carnival candy) we collect we want to send to the finders as thanks", says Christian Gogos. "It would be exciting to find out who the finders are. Maybe they are four friends," says Julia Gogos.

Orig. text: General Anzeiger. Translation: ck