ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 22, 1996 TAG: 9604230092
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY, N.C.
SOURCE: JON GLASS LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
For days, Rose Stella listened to the weather forecast, waiting for a steady west wind to blow. Finally, on a cold December day in 1994, the wind came.
Stella, then 12, and her family drove from their home in Elizabeth City, N.C., to Nags Head. And then, from a 21-foot outboard motorboat, about five miles off the beach at Oregon Inlet, Stella tossed a bottle to the ocean currents.
Carefully rolled up and sealed inside was a letter she had written to anyone lucky enough to find it.
Last week, 15 months later, Stella received a response - from more than 3,000 miles away.
A teen-ager named Kristin Johannsdottir, who lives in Hvolsvollur, Iceland, discovered the bottle last month on a beach near Skogar, along the country's southern coast. Kristin wrote that Iceland, an island about the size of Virginia in the North Atlantic, is famous for its volcanoes, geysers and glaciers.
``I've always dreamed of finding a letter like this, so I was very glad,'' Kristin said in her letter to Rose. ``I'm so excited about all this, maybe it was a destiny.''
Rose, now an eighth-grader at Norfolk (Va.) Collegiate, was just as excited.
``I was really thrilled,'' Rose said Tuesday. ``I never dreamed it would go this far.''
Rose's mother, Leslie Stella, said the strong west wind probably blew the bottle into the Gulf Stream off the Outer Banks, and then it drifted northward with the currents.
Actually, the Stella family has done a lot of thinking about such matters. Since 1989, Rose and her three siblings have launched more than 20 bottles. They use thick, dark champagne bottles and seal them with liquid plastic to protect the paper messages.
One of the bottles apparently bobbed at sea for five years before turning up in the Azores, a group of islands in the North Atlantic about 800 miles north of Portugal. Another one washed up in Portugal. They have a framed newspaper article from ``The Royal Gazette'' in Bermuda about a Canadian serviceman stationed there finding another of their bottles.
``We always thought it would be neat to find a bottle - but the only way you get mail is to send it,'' Leslie Stella said.
For beachcombers like the Stellas, the prospect of finding a message in a bottle on the beach is akin to finding a pirate's buried treasure. But some are not so romantic-minded: Rose said a bottle launched by one of her brothers was found by a volunteer at a federal wildlife agency on the Outer Banks. He sent the boy a brochure on recycling, Rose said.
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: JIM WALKER/Landmark News Service. Rose Stella, 14, anby CNBeighth-grader at Norfolk Collegiate, holds the letter she sealed in
a bottle and threw into the ocean off the Oregon Inlet and the reply
she received from the girl in Iceland who found it.