On a wildly stormy morning on a beach in northeast Scotland, a dog named Maggie was doing what dogs do best: sniffing everything in sight. Her owner Mike Scott, a photographer who walks his dogs at St Cyrus in Aberdeenshire almost every day, noticed Maggie circling a dark glass bottle washing up from the waves. He had found a message in a bottle once before that turned out to be from nearby Dundee, so he did not expect much. He tucked the bottle in his backpck, brought it home, and opened it to find a zip bag containing a handwritten letter in French. When he ran it through a translation app, the story it told stopped him completely. The note said the bottle had been dropped into the sea from a ferry traveling between Prince Edward Island and the Iles-de-la-Madeleine in Canada, placed there by a woman who asked that anyone finding it please get in touch.
That meant the small glass bottle had survived two full winters in open ocean, crossing the entire North Atlantic, rounding the top of Scotland, drifting into the North Sea, and washing ashore at St Cyrus, a journey of roughly 2,700 miles. Scott said he was amazed the bottle had made it at all, let alone arrived completely unbroken after so long at sea. His wife tracked the sender down on Facebook and sent a message letting her know where the bottle had landed, though as of the time the story was reported, no reply had come back. Maggie has received full and enthusiastic credit for the discovery, and Scott says she remains entirely unbothered, which is exactly what you would expect from a dog who just made one of the most remarkable beach finds in recent memory on an otherwise ordinary Scottish morning.
