Maine island cleanup leads to message in bottle

SOUTH ADDISON, Maine (AP) — Volunteers picking up trash off a coastal Maine island found a message in a bottle that floated down the coast from Canada.

Becky Lee of the Downeast Coastal Conservancy said she discovered the note in a plastic soda bottle as she and others cleaned up Tibbett Island off South Addison.

The note from a young Canadian girl named Taryn had been tossed in the ocean in July 2000. Lee told the Bangor Daily News she suspected Taryn got help from her parents writing the note about her vacation in New Brunswick because it said she was just 3 years old.

Now 15, Taryn McKee, of Welland, Ontario, told the Welland Tribune that she doesn't even remember the note or the bottle, but she recalls parts of the family vacation like collecting seashells and getting seasick on a whale-watching boat.

Taryn's mother, Cheryl McKee, said she wrote notes in bottles for Taryn and her son, Jacob, who was 2 at the time. The bottles were thrown in the ocean on the family's last day of vacation in Letete, New Brunswick, which is about 50 miles from South Addison.

"I had hopes it would go far," McKee said. "Who would have thought, 12 years later."