It was a wild day on St Cyrus beach when Maggie the Labrador decided to investigate a bottle bobbing in the shallows. The dark brown wine bottle looked unremarkable — just another piece of flotsam on the Aberdeenshire coast. But Maggie's nose knew better.
Her owner, Mike Scott, a 60-year-old professional photographer from nearby Johnshaven, walks his dogs at St Cyrus most days. He's found messages in bottles before — once, from Dundee — so he wasn't expecting much when he fished this one out of the surf about two weeks ago.
"It was a really dark glass bottle with a lid and something in it," Scott told BBC Scotland. Inside was a zip-lock bag, and inside that, a short handwritten note on blue paper. There was just one problem: it was written in French.
Scott tucked the bottle into his rucksack and headed home. When he ran the note through a translator, his jaw dropped.
The message said it had been tossed overboard from a ferry travelling between Prince Edward Island and the Îles-de-la-Madeleine — off Canada's east coast — in August 2024. It was signed by a woman named Annie Chaisson, who asked whoever found it to contact her on Facebook.
That small glass bottle had crossed roughly 2,700 miles of open ocean, surviving two North Atlantic winters before washing up on a Scottish beach. Scott worked out the likely route: from Canada's eastern seaboard, across the North Atlantic, over the top of Scotland, and down into the North Sea.
"That bottle had a hell of a journey," Scott told PNI Atlantic News.
The mystery deepened when Scott's wife tried to track down Chaisson on Facebook. They found what they believe is her profile and sent a message — but have heard nothing back. The account appears to be inactive.
"I am not up on the Facebook, so I got my wife to message her," Scott said. "We said we got your message, but we have not heard anything back."
BBC Scotland News and Charlottetown's Guardian newspaper have also attempted to contact Chaisson, so far without success. The message, the bottle, and the little blue letter now sit in Scott's garage — evidence of an extraordinary voyage, waiting for its sender to complete the story.
Scott, who posts his photography on Instagram as mikescottartist, still marvels at the find. "It's amazing it was not smashed," he said. "I do not imagine she thought it would end up in Scotland across the Atlantic."
It's not the first time a Canadian message in a bottle has made the crossing. A separate letter launched off Newfoundland in 2012 reportedly washed up on Ireland's Dingle Peninsula last July. But for Scott and Maggie, this one feels personal.
Somewhere in Prince Edward Island, Annie Chaisson may not yet know that her impulsive act on a summer ferry ride — finishing a bottle of wine, scribbling a note, sealing it tight, and tossing it into the Gulf of St Lawrence — launched a small glass vessel on an epic 18-month odyssey across the Atlantic. And that it took a very good dog to bring it home.
