It looks like a movie scene. A glass bottle washed up with a message inside—but there was much more to it than that. It was Secundino Refojos who found the object in Oia, Pontevedra, in Galicia, and a few kilometers north of the mouth of the river Minho.
The bottle of Jameson whiskey had clear instructions on what to do next. It was transporting the ashes of an American surfer named Paul Nichols. A native of the state of Florida, he died at age 35 and left one last request.
It wasn’t the first time that Secundino Refojos had found one of these bottles, but with that content — someone’s ashes — it was something unheard of. The note asked that the ashes be scattered in the exact spot where they had been found. Fulfilled that wish, Paul Nichols asked to notify the family.
Written in English, the note brought the email address of a tavern in Atlanta, also in the United States, as reported by the newspaper “O Minho”. The aim was for Paul Nichols’ sister to be notified so that she could later tell Zoe, the surfer’s daughter, that her father, a “happy and passionate man for people”, continued “surfing the world”.
In addition, the bottle, which was sealed with polyurethane foam and completely plasticized on the outside, as the same newspaper refers, still brought two dollars “for a beer”. “When we saw the plastic we thought it was drugs,” Secundino Refojos told the newspaper “La Voz de Galicia”.
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