Little Boys’ Dreams Connect With Help From Ocean Currents

It’s a small world for little boys.

That’s what young Hart Wanetick learned this week with the news that his message in a bottle--cast 20 months ago off the California coast as part of his older sister’s school project--was recently found by another boy off the faraway Western Pacific island of Guam.

The wine bottle, which included a note with a 5-year-old’s etching of a skull and crossbones, has apparently started a long-distance relationship between Hart and 6-year-old Jess Jerry (J. J.) Meno that will soon result in a more modern exchange of letters and postcards.

“This is more incredible than winning the lottery,” said Hart’s mother, Ann Kennedy, marveling at the discovery. “A little boy sends off a bottle with a message. Almost two years and 6,000 miles later, it’s found by another little boy--one who speaks English. What are the odds of that?”

For a child like Hart, there was about as much chance of success as aiming a slingshot at the moon.

“I think it’s exciting,” the second-grader said Wednesday. “That bottle went all the way across the ocean.”

Hart, now 7, had to be reminded by his parents that he had sent the bottle, after the family received a call at its Adams Avenue home Monday night from a Guam newspaper reporter.

“He said, ‘What bottle?’ ” his mother recalled. “Then he remembered. He got so excited that he couldn’t wait to go to school the next day to tell his friends.”

The wine bottle, Kennedy said, was among 30 sent to sea as part of her daughter Sydney’s class project on ocean currents with other fourth-graders at St. Vincent’s school in Mission Hills. None of the other bottles have gotten responses.

“We had an extra bottle, so I helped Hart come up with a note,” Kennedy said. “He was four years younger than the other kids and wasn’t really even involved in the project. It was kind of a whim.”

The signed message read: “To ye who finds me: I, Hart Wanetick, send this letter out on May 20th, 1990. Please respond if you can. Thanks.”

Jerome Wanetick, a program analyst for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Coastal Studies, said he arranged for the bottles to be dropped by the research vessel New Horizon about 200 miles off the coast of San Diego.

“For the kids, it was kind of a crapshoot--you know, throw the bottle out and see what happens,” he said. “But you can look at a map of current tracks in the ocean and see how the bottle might have been caught by the California Current and taken to the North Equatorial Current. From there, it’s a straight shot.”

Last month, the bottle washed ashore near the tiny fishing village of Agat on the balmy English-speaking Western Pacific island of Guam--a U.S. possession 30 miles long and 8 miles wide--that lies east of the Philippines.

On Jan. 19, J. J. Meno, who lives in Agat, was fishing with his stepfather, uncle and older brother when he saw the bottle lying in the sand. “He picked it up and was going to throw it back when my stepdad said, ‘Hey, wait, there’s something inside,’ ” the boy’s 16-year-old sister, Saunia, said in a telephone interview.

Young J. J., a first-grader and the youngest of five children, says he still cannot read very well and had to have the message read to him. But that didn’t matter. The connection had been made.

Now, J. J. says, he’s a celebrity on his tiny island home. The Pacific Daily News, the largest newspaper on Guam, ran a story Thursday about the find--complete with J. J.’s picture.

In a soon-to-be-written series of cards and letters, J. J. says, he plans to educate his new pen pal on the goings-on around Guam.

“Hart doesn’t know anything about Guam,” he said. “I’m going to talk to him about toys and about fishing and about my school here.”

Saunia Meno says her brother’s discovery of Hart’s wine bottle lends her new hope that the message in a bottle she cast from the shore near her village last year will someday find its way into someone’s hands.

“Now I can’t wait to see who contacts me,” she said.