Ray L. sighting...

[DL]

There is an article in today's OC register local section about Ray's daughter, and her message in a bottle experiment from their trip to Panama last Winter. The last name sounded familiar and when I flipped to the rest of the article the picture confirmed what I assumed...

[Ray L.]

I thought it was a very neat story for my Daughter.
Ray L.

[ash]

Do you know if the article was posted on line or in what paper? I would like to read it.

Too Cool

[Ray L.]

Register...if you go to orange county register you can find it....

[gt5bass]

http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/06/0 ... 542062.php

Now what ya gonna do Ray...now that your daughter is famous

[Ray L.]

as they say **** happens
Ray L.

[Brian D.]

Can you copy the article in the post. The OC register requires a login. TIA!

[DL]

unless I have an account I dont know about

[DL]

LAGUNA NIGUEL – Ray and Diane Leyerly split a bottle of wine while their daughter Christina sat listlessly at the table. The bored 12-year-old hadn't made any friends on the cruise populated mostly by older people.

Ray handed her the empty cabernet bottle and suggested she write a message and throw it overboard.

The sixth-grader went to her cabin, whipped out a pink pen and wrote in large bubble script:

"Dear person, My name is Christina Leyerly. I threw this bottle off a ship/cruise on December 29, 2004 ... I was on this ship for 12 days. I live in California, near Laguna Beach. When you get this message in a bottle, please send it to this address."

She slipped in $2 for return postage, pushed in a cork and sealed it tightly.

Then she gathered her family on deck to ceremoniously throw the bottle over.

Somewhere between the Panama Canal and Jamaica, Christina hurled the wine bottle overboard and heard it crash. She pictured it bursting on impact.

Five months later

Mark Jackson, a 47-year-old Texan, was kayaking the backside of San Jose Island off the coast of Texas 1,700 miles away when he noticed a green bottle with a piece of paper inside.

He waded over, plucked the barnacle-encrusted bottle from a pile of seaweed and uncorked it. "I rarely see anyone over that way, and if they are, they are in boats. It was a fluke that the bottle was found," says Jackson, a paramedic from San Marcos.

He tried to pull out the message, but the letter, damp from condensation, kept tearing. At home he finally covered the bottle with a sock and broke it with a hammer. He scanned the letter.

"I kind of could tell by the handwriting that it was a little girl, and I thought, 'By all means I am going to write back because it was a child,' " Jackson says. "I always like to encourage people's imagination, especially kids."

He was floored when he learned the bottle traveled from near the Panama Canal. "Oh my goodness," he exclaimed. "That's why it was all crusty."

Back in california

The letter from Texas dated May 9 arrived for Christina. The Laguna Niguel family was stumped.

"Who have you been writing in Texas now?" Ray asked Christina. This is a girl with pen pals in Korea, Sweden, London, Arizona, Nevada and Canada.

She breaks into a big smile, braces gleaming, when talking about her pen pals.

She launched a letter-writing campaign at an early age. She wrote to President George W. Bush two months after he was first elected and invited him to play golf with her brother and father.

"The president and his wife wrote to me," she says proudly. They sent a picture too. "I was really excited.

"I like writing. A lot. I just feel happy because I make a lot of friends all the time, and I make them happy and they make me happy. We talk about things that happened in the past," says Christina, who loves to in-line skate and skate board.

Christina opened the letter from Texas and found her $2, her letter and a brief note.

"Dear Christina, my name is Mark Jackson. I found your bottle while fishing the bays of the Texas coast. I was kayaking on the backside of San Jose island near the city of Port Aransas, TX, when I noticed your bottle among the debris. How exciting to find a treasure these days. Good luck on your next adventure."

Christina started "freaking out," says her father. "My wife and I were shocked." He says he threw bottles with messages into the ocean eight times when he was a child but never got a response. "We called the whole family and told them."

"It was cool," says Christina, a student at Aliso Viejo Christian School.

'A matter of luck'

Joseph Reid, professor emeritus with UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, says he's surprised the message survived.

"The cork could either be eaten by bacteria or by marine growth. It is a matter of luck."

He says the currents, which have a general circulation along the coast, up Mexico and Texas, sent the bottle along its way.

"For the thousands of bottles people throw over, only a small number are recovered because most sink," Reid says.

There have been other Orange County cases of messages in bottles. The best-known involved the Abreu family, Cubans who corresponded with Judy d'Albert's class after the teacher dropped a message in a bottle into the sea in 1990. The students, who became pen pals with the family, helped fund the Abreus' journey to America.

Christina has yet to write back to Jackson, but hopes to find a new pen pal out of the experience.

Jackson says he looks forward to hearing from her. "I had a little adventure myself," he says. "The person who threw it had some imagination, not just sitting on a boat and watching the water go by. It was somebody who wanted to see what else is out there. She made my day."

[Brian D.]

*NM*

[Ray L.]

Hi everyone! This is Raymond Leyerly's daughter Christina. The one who sent the message in a bottle. I was so excited that I was in the register. Thanks for saying the nice things. I don't know what my dad is going to do about me being famous! He must be SO jealous! I am joking! I hope you all catch 5 BIG FISH alive & well! Good Luck! See you all later!


From,

Christina Marie Leyerly!

[DL]

...tell your dad he owes us all lunch for being in the paper!!

[Brian Linehan]

*NM*

[ash]

How cool is that!

[jeff bradshaw]

very cool Christina!

Jeff Bradshaw

[mark poulson]

What a neat deal. Just shows what comes of taking a chance and having a little faith once in a while.