In April, Julie and Dug Watkins were walking their dogs on Sandsend Beach, near their home in northern Scotland. As Julie was taking a short swim in the cold water, her husband found something unusual lying on the pebbles: an amber-colored wine bottle.
The bottle was sandy and partly covered with seaweed. Inside, they found a note saying it had been released on sea ice near Utqiagvik, on Alaska’s North Slope, six years earlier. The author had drawn a picture of a whale on the back and signed it: Craig George.
“When we read the message in the bottle and realized how significant a thing it was, we were really very excited,” Julie Watkins said.
John Craighead George was a prominent whale expert who lived in Utqiagvik for decades. He died in 2023 — three years after setting the bottle adrift — leaving behind an extensive body of research. He published studies on things like how long bowheads can live and how they can survive in cold waters.
“I suppose Craig lives on in that message,” Watkins said. “He probably lives on in so many ways, but that was just one more thing.”
Release
Originally from New York, George was instrumental in starting a bowhead whale census back in the 1970s that incorporated knowledge of Iñupiaq hunters and supported their subsistence.
Kate Stafford, a researcher at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, counted whales with George in the spring of 2019. For several months, they took hour-long snowmachine rides to an observation perch built on the ice north of Utqiagvik. At the end of the census, she said they followed George’s tradition and released several bottles with messages.
“Most of the time, we put them in the lead, and they probably got crushed when the ice moved around,” she said. “We thought this time, we would put them on the sea ice.”
Over the years, George collected sturdy wine bottles and emptied them with friends during music nights – which, to Stafford, is a lovely memory in itself. She said he would write his messages on waterproof paper, seal the bottles with wax and tape, and release them after the whale census.
The only known retrieval happened when one of those bottles washed up in Point Lay, about 180 miles to the southwest. That is, until now.
“Craig was the most curious person you'd ever meet,” Stafford said. “I think it just tickled him to think about putting a message – often with a little drawing that he'd done, and the weather, and the date – putting it in a bottle and seeing where it ended up, or if it ever got recovered. He would have been so thrilled that that bottle was recovered in such an interesting spot, like the Atlantic.”
The journey
When George released the bottle near Point Barrow, the northernmost tip of the United States, he was facing a strong northeastward stream. Seth Danielson, a physical oceanographer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who was also George’s colleague and friend, said the bottle most likely got caught in the Beaufort Gyre, a clockwise ocean circulation that sent it toward the East Siberian Sea.
Then, the Transpolar Current likely picked it up. That’s the same stream that helped the explorer Fridtjof Nansen's Fram drift from the Russian coast to Norway in the late 1800s. In the 1990s, it contributed to the global spread of rubber duckies after a spill in the North Pacific.
“There's sort of this large ocean superhighway of ice that moves from the East Siberian Sea towards Fram Strait on the east side of Greenland,” Danielson said.
Danielson said that somewhere south of Iceland, the bottle probably drifted east and was caught by the North Atlantic Current, which carried it to its final destination: Shapinsay, one of the Orkney Islands, off the north coast of Scotland.
Discovery
There are no bowheads in Orkney, but the area is a popular whale watching spot for orcas. Julie and Dug Watkins – the couple who found George’s bottle – shared their discovery in a local Facebook group for whale enthusiasts. They learned that another Orkney resident knew George from helping with the whale census in Alaska, back in the 1980s.
“It's just absolutely incredible that it should travel that far and not get broken or nothing else happened to it, but also end up on this beach, on this island, where people knew about him and respected his work and things,” Julie Watkins said. “It's unbelievable almost, but it happened.”
The note in the bottle included George’s email address. The couple reached out, to no avail. Then they contacted the City of Utqagvik, which connected them with George’s widow, Cyd Hanns.
Hanns said she was glad the couple kept trying to reach out. She wrote to them about George’s life and research, as well as Alaska whaling traditions.
“I was happy-sad because he wasn't here,” Hanns said. “He has so many friends around the world, and still making them.”
Julie Watkins’s husband Dug died unexpectedly a month after finding the bottle. The family sent his ashes out in a small burning boat from the same beach where the bottle washed up. Losing a loved one was a point of connection between Hanns and Watkins, who have stayed in touch over email.
And Hanns said the discovery brought her family closer together, three years after her husband’s death.
“It's a story on the ocean currents and the way loved ones can surprise us even after they're gone,” she said.
