English girl’s message in a bottle turns up in Zeeland, 20 years later

A Zeeland couple out walking their dog on the beach just before Christmas have found a message in a bottle, thrown into the sea by a 10-year-old English girl over 22 years ago.

Zoe Averianov, then known as Zoe Lemon, tossed the plastic bottle into the sea before getting on the ferry for a holiday in Germany. In the note, she wrote that she liked ballet and playing the flute and piano, and had a hamster called Sparkle.

Jacqueline and Pieter Piket’s dog found the bottle while out walking on a quiet stretch of the Oosterschelde dyke between Serooskerke and Zierikzee. ‘If we did not have a dog that was crazy about plastic bottles, we would never have found it,’ Pieter Piket told broadcaster Omroep Zeeland.

The Dutch couple sent a letter back to Zoe, whose parents still live in the same house. They took it with them when they visited their daughter at Christmas.

‘The first thing I saw was my hand-writing as a child and my little letter  saying who I was and about my pets and my hobbies. It made me a bit emotional,’ Zoe told the Manchester Evening News.

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