A Love Note Tossed Into the Sea Washed Up in Ireland 13 Years Later

In September 2012, Brad and Anita Squires were near the end of a quiet picnic on Bell Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. They had been dating about a year, in a long-distance relationship, and on impulse Anita wrote a few lines on a piece of paper: “Today we enjoyed dinner, this bottle of wine and each other on the edge of the island.” She tucked the note into the empty wine bottle, and Brad hurled it from the cliffs into Conception Bay, fully expecting it to shatter on the rocks below. It didn’t.

Instead, the bottle drifted out into the Atlantic and stayed afloat for nearly thirteen years, travelling roughly 3,000 kilometres. On July 7, 2025, Kate and Jon Gay found it washed up on a beach along Ireland’s southwest coast. That evening they opened it together with members of a local conservation group, the Maharees Conservation Association, and read the long-ago message from a couple an ocean away.

“They had been dating about a year, in a long-distance relationship, and on impulse Anita wrote a few lines on a piece of paper: “Today we enjoyed dinner, this bottle of wine and each other on the edge of the island.”

The story might have ended there, but the finders wanted to close the loop. Martha Farrell of the conservation association helped track down the Squires through social media. By the time they were found, Brad and Anita had married in 2016 and were raising three children—two teenagers and a younger child. They were, in other words, still very much together. “We were young in love and now we’re older in love,” Brad said.

Both households marked the strange and lovely coincidence by raising a toast across the Atlantic. “Anita and I both feel like we have new friends,” Brad added. A bottle thrown in a moment of romance had not only survived the ocean for over a decade, it had quietly connected two families on opposite shores, turning a small private gesture into a shared story of love that lasted.