A fishing boat, it allows people to catch fish! Duh!

15 years ago, a young Japanese girl sent a letter into the sky in a balloon. A fisherman found the folded paper sticking on a sticky flatfish he caught 3,300 feet below the Pacific, with a torn-off string and the fragment of a red balloon still on the fish. What was the message on the paper? Was it some kind of Japanese super-paper?

The folded up note read “Our school is 120 years old… If you pick up this letter, please write to me,” including the school’s address. Boring. But it was found by a 52 year old fisherman who called it “unbelievable”. He caught it off Choshi port, which was only 93 miles away from the elementary school in Kawasaki in which a six year old girl wrote it and sent it off.

Natsumi Shirahige released the letter into the wild in 1993, as part of the school’s 120th anniversary celebration. She said that “I can’t get over the wonder of how the letter survived 15 years. I never expected I’d get a reply this way.” Really? She never expected you’d get a reply from a fisherman who caught a fish who somehow got attached to your note, and that it remained legible deep in the ocean depths? Well I would have expected that! It’s the most obvious conclusion…

Wonder if the “folded paper” was an origami crane?

[Source]

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