unclemac
Gold Member
- Oct 12, 2011
- 7,024
- 6,921
- Primary Interest:
- Beach & Shallow Water Hunting
This is the story of my very first bottle…and it was actually found at my beach and at the basin. When I was a kid my family used to go down to this spot, we had a friend that had a cabin here and we would come down with him two or three times a year. (He, by the way just celebrated his 100[SUP]th[/SUP] birthday and he STILL owns his cabin). (Nobody sells these places, they get handed down). Anyway, My mother was a fearless arrowhead, agate, glass-ball beach comber and I learned the trade from her. I spent my childhood from the time I could walk on this beach, walking slow with my eyes on the ground. The people were friendly (what few you EVER saw), the beach dogs were friendly and most of these places were used as hunting cabins. I must have seen 30 or 40 elk butchered and skinned down there over the years.
Well anyway, in those days bottles were all over the beach, new ones with every tide and they were all cork tops too. We used to love writing messages and heaving them into the ocean and I did in fact find a few with messages too. Bottles were everywhere and, for a kid, bottles were meant to be broken. You put them up at the foot of the cliffs and threw stones at them like you were plinking with a 22. (When we were older it was a 22 come to think of it). (Seriously, can you imagine these days giving a 12 year old a rifle and letting him loose on the beach by himself?)
Well one day when I was about 6 or 7 I found this bottle that was particularly hard to break. I wasn't having any luck tossing stones, they would bounce off. I eventually got pretty ticked off and picked up the bottle and threw it against the rocks…and IT bounced off. Well I had had it with the dam thing and just let it lay and wandered off to make a beach fort or something. Later when I got back to the cabin…there was this SAME bottle sitting on the table. I didn't know what to think but I knew what I was gonna do to it when I got the chance since I knew for a fact where the ax was kept. My dad however, called me over and pointed something out to me…this bottle was an old bottle, notice the neck and how wrinkled it is, but even better, he pointed out the Kanji characters at the bottom. After that I started to NOTICE the bottles before I tossed stones at them and started to find many Japanese ones. But never as good as this one, my FIRST bottle. I much latter found out that these old sake bottle were the very kind that the Japanese would re-cycle and make into their glass floats. Notice the similarity between the bottle and the float.
Well anyway, in those days bottles were all over the beach, new ones with every tide and they were all cork tops too. We used to love writing messages and heaving them into the ocean and I did in fact find a few with messages too. Bottles were everywhere and, for a kid, bottles were meant to be broken. You put them up at the foot of the cliffs and threw stones at them like you were plinking with a 22. (When we were older it was a 22 come to think of it). (Seriously, can you imagine these days giving a 12 year old a rifle and letting him loose on the beach by himself?)
Well one day when I was about 6 or 7 I found this bottle that was particularly hard to break. I wasn't having any luck tossing stones, they would bounce off. I eventually got pretty ticked off and picked up the bottle and threw it against the rocks…and IT bounced off. Well I had had it with the dam thing and just let it lay and wandered off to make a beach fort or something. Later when I got back to the cabin…there was this SAME bottle sitting on the table. I didn't know what to think but I knew what I was gonna do to it when I got the chance since I knew for a fact where the ax was kept. My dad however, called me over and pointed something out to me…this bottle was an old bottle, notice the neck and how wrinkled it is, but even better, he pointed out the Kanji characters at the bottom. After that I started to NOTICE the bottles before I tossed stones at them and started to find many Japanese ones. But never as good as this one, my FIRST bottle. I much latter found out that these old sake bottle were the very kind that the Japanese would re-cycle and make into their glass floats. Notice the similarity between the bottle and the float.
