MURRELLS INLET, S.C. (WBTW) -- A South Carolina fisherman who was asked to drop a memorial bottle 50 miles off the coast in 2021 says it was recently found in France.
Shane Bashor, owner and operator of Side Kick Charters in Murrells Inlet, was working on his charter boat three years ago when a woman he didn't know approached him. She asked if he could take the bottle far off the coast and drop it in the ocean to remember her daughter.
"The chances of something floating from here to France have got to be pretty astronomical, I would think," Bashor said.
Bashor said the woman had lost her daughter almost five years ago to a laced fentanyl drug overdose. He said she put a letter remembering her daughter in the bottle, as well as purple ribbons for overdose awareness.
He said he waited a few months before he went out far enough to drop the bottle at sea. Three years went by without him really thinking about it, and then, he said, he received a text.
"I don't know if you remember me or not, but I gave you this bottle for my daughter three years ago when we were in Myrtle Beach, and I got an email back from these two ladies that found it," Bashor said.
Bashor said he couldn't believe the bottle ended up in France three years later. All it would have taken to break it was a cargo ship or other floating object hitting and cracking it and sinking it to the ocean floor.
Bashor said he thinks the bottle being found has brought the woman some healing and closure.
"Although it's sort of a sad story, it still makes me happy, and it feels as if it's got a happy conclusion or ending to it," Bashor said.
He said the people who found the bottle will probably take a ribbon and drop it back into the sea. He added maybe this isn't the conclusion. The woman's memorial could live on for another round of travels.
"Maybe it'll wind up in Jamaica or Cuba or who knows where it goes from France, but I don't know maybe three, four, five years from now, I'll get another crazy text out of the blue saying you'll never believe where the bottle and letters made it to now," Bashor said.
He said the woman is now an author and founder of the Forgotten Victims of North Carolina, which works to help families who have lost loved ones to drug overdoses.