Hong Kong photographer's message in a bottle brings Vancouver encounter
Each day for 32 days during a journey to Colombia on a container ship, Leong Ka Tai and his wife threw a message in a bottle into the sea – and one of them was discovered in July 2015 off Canada’s Pacific coast
One fine morning last July, Carla Crossman, a marine biologist from Vancouver Aquarium, was sailing on the Hecate Strait off Canada’s west coast, looking for whales. Instead, she stumbled on a message in a bottle.
“The USB is fully functional,” says Crossman in an email. “I am trying to dry out the paper and remove it from the bottle without breaking it, so I have not had a chance to read the physical paper yet. I would love to hear more about when/why these bottles made their way out to sea!”
More than 9,000 kilometres away, Hong Kong photographer Leong Ka Tai was thrilled that one of 32 bottles he had thrown into the Pacific eight months before had been picked up.
Three months after their first email exchange, Leong and his wife flew to Vancouver to meet Crossman. Their encounter, documented on video, is on show in a multimedia exhibition titled “Over the Ocean, On the Road” at the Hong Kong Design Institute.