11-Year-Old Teddy Herrick, Its Finder, Is Interviewed on CNN

TELLURIDE – Local 11-year-old Teddy Herrick has always been infatuated with the ocean.

Most of the books she reads are about the ocean, says her mother, Jan, including one of her favorites: Mermaid Bracelet, a book about a girl who finds a message in a bottle written by a mermaid looking for a friend.

This summer, fantasy met reality when Teddy found a real-life message in a bottle, floating in the ocean in the Nantucket Sound.

The message wasn’t written by a mermaid, but instead had been dropped in the ocean six weeks prior by a 7-year-old girl on a cruise ship 600 miles off the coast of North Carolina on the way to Bermuda.

Teddy wrote the message bottler, who lives on the East Coast, and sent her a photocopy of the note.

A reporter from CNN caught wind of the story.

Herrick says the experience was a pretty big deal for daughter Teddy, who spoke to CNN reporter Jason Hanna by telephone last week about finding the message. Teddy and her family, who live in Telluride but spend part of their summers in Cape Cod, were boating from Cape Cod to Cuttyhunk Island in the Nantucket Sound.

“We were cruising along in pea-soup fog, when all of a sudden my husband said he thought we might have just passed a message in a bottle,” Herrick tells. “Todd has been boating on the Cape for 35 years and has never found anything like that, so we kept going…only to turn around a quarter-mile later to go back and see.”

Teddy fished the bottle, covered in clams, from out of the water with a fishing net. Through the plastic, Teddy, her sister Jennifer, and their cousins could see a little roll of white paper: A real message in a bottle.

“I never pushed for any of the kids to write this little girl back,” Herrick says, “but Teddy wanted to.”

After Teddy wrote the little girl, Megan, her mother contacted their local news station; eventually, the story drifted to reporter Jason Hanna at CNN.com. The story of Teddy’s message in a bottle will be posted on the CNN website sometime this week, Hanna said.