When 16-year-old Matthew Goulden found a message in a bottle off Seven Mile Beach while home for the school holidays earlier this year, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to find who had sent the note.
But with the help of the drying properties of the Caribbean sun, careful handling of the bedraggled note, a little Google Earth searching by his dad, and eventually a letter posted to a likely address in Iowa, late last month Matthew got to meet the little girl and her dad who’d sent the message.
The note in the bottle had come from Madelyn, age 6. Her father Colin had dropped it, inside a glass bottle, at the bottom of a buoy at a dive site off Seven Mile Beach when they visited Cayman from the US in January this year.
“We got a note back, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, it actually worked, I can’t believe that,'” her dad said.
Though the message in the bottle did not travel far, it created a connection that spanned more than 4,000 miles – from Matthew in the UK to Madelyn in Iowa.
Madelyn and Colin were in Cayman last month visiting her grandparents, Cindy and Jim, but were due to leave two days after Matthew arrived home from boarding school in the UK.
During that brief window, the families got together when Matthew and his dad Richard dropped by the grandparents’ vacation apartment on Seven Mile Beach to meet Madelyn, who is called Maddie by her family and friends.
Matthew explained that he spotted the bottle while he was snorkelling off Seven Mile.
“If I see trash in the ocean, I normally swim down to pick it up. So, I saw something down there that clearly was not normal. I swam down to it to pick it up and, at first, I thought it was just trash, but then I had a closer look and thought it might be something else,” he said.
“We took it back to the beach and saw it was a note, which is really cool. We gave it about four or five days to dry. I did not think the note was actually going to survive; unfortunately, some water got in the bottle somehow.
“There were some words that got torn a bit, but it was quite surprising that what survived were the name and address, and that was really all we needed to send a message back to say we’d found it.”
He said he’d written back, wishing Maddie a happy life, “because it didn’t take much time and it was a nice thing to do”.
His dad Richard said they could just about make out the address, so he searched for it on Google Earth to make sure it existed, and “I could zoom right in”.
“I could see your house,” he told Maddie and Colin.
Once he’d established it was a real address, the letter from Matthew was sent off to Iowa.
Colin takes up the narrative from there: “When I went to the mailbox and saw the letter, I was wondering, who is sending mail to my daughter. I thought this is either going to be really good or really bad.”
It turned out to be really good, he said, as the two families sat and chatted and ate cake together.
The Cayman Compass also played a small part in bringing them together, as the return address on the envelope wasn’t very clear. Cindy contacted the Compass for help in tracking down Matthew. A quick search for Gouldens in Cayman led to Richard’s brother, who provided an email address.
Common interests
Matthew and Maddie, it turns out, share some common interests – in football, cats, and even stuffed toys.
Matthew, a former student at Cayman Prep and now attending Repton School in Derbyshire, England, hopes to become a professional footballer, “or as you’d call it, soccer,” he told his new American friends.
He’ll be attending an ‘ID’ soccer camp in Atlanta this summer at which college coaches identify potential new players.
Maddie also plays soccer. When she was younger, she played in three-on-three games, and has now graduated to five-on-five, she said, “and in my last game I scored my first goal”.
Maddie is an aficionado of stuffed animal toys, and during the Goulden’s visit produced some of her most recent acquisitions from Cayman – a turtle, an octopus and a stingray and its baby – to show Matthew, who says he amassed quite a collection himself when he was younger.
They also share a love of animals, and traded stories about Matthew’s cats and Maddie’s cat and dog. As the adults chatted, Matthew scrolled through his phone, showing Maddie photos of his pets.
Maddie presented her new friend with a ‘kindness rock’ – a stone handpainted with a message – and a T-shirt from her home state of Iowa.
The families plan to stay in touch, and Maddie and her dad and grandparents say they’ll come watch Matthew play football if he plays in the United States.
Editor’s note: Madelyn’s family has asked that her surname not be included in this story.
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