Bottled Message Travels the Pacific, Reaches Philippines

When radio talk show host Ross Olney began throwing bottled messages into the Pacific six years ago, he never dreamed that one would end up in the central Philippines.

Every whale-watching season since 1984, Olney--the host of an afternoon news and entertainment show on radio station KVEN in Ventura--tosses at least two marked wine bottles out into the waters of Southern California. The lucky finder of such a bottle wins a gift, which, in the past, has included water beds, diamond ring sets and stereo systems.

“All the things that have happened in the world in the last four years, and this bottle has just been floating around!” said Olney, 60, of Ventura. “A little tiny bottle in that big ocean is very hard to find. This gives me some hope that some others have been found by others just as far away.”

The latest winner, Darwin Pena Randa, a fisherman from the Philippines, found the bottle in January and wrote a letter to Olney to claim his guaranteed prize--a 35mm camera and 10 rolls of film.

Meteorologists told Olney that for the bottle to have arrived in the Surigao del Sur region of the Philippines, it must have traveled more than 10,000 miles along a Pacific tidal current. “It went past Washington, Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, just passed Russia, and came down to the Philippines,” Olney said.

The bottle included a letter on KVEN stationery and a personalized gift certificate typed by Olney. The directions told the finder to call the radio station collect to claim the prize, Olney said.

Rather than a call, however, Olney earlier this year received a letter from Randa that read: “I am the founder of the lucky bottle. We found the bottle at the sea coz I am a fisher man,” Olney said.