Canadian woman visits Westport after her message in a bottle is discovered on local beach

A Canadian woman who tossed a message in a bottle into the sea 24 years ago has visited the West Mayo beach where it was discovered earlier this year. 

Lexi Ploc-Canning, a native of Ontario with Irish connections through her grandfather, has said she wants to move to Mayo after she visited local couple Aoife and Tom Bourke, who discovered her message in a bottle on Bertra Beach while out walking with their children. 

Ms Ploc-Canning threw the bottle into the Atlantic Ocean in Newfoundland when she was eight years old ‘thinking that pirates were going to find it’. 

“I had forgotten about it for a very long time time and then shortly before they found the letter both my grandparents passed away and then I was remembering all the memories with them and thought about the letter and then it was a couple of weeks after I thought about the letter that it popped up here,” Ms Ploc-Canning told The Mayo News. 

^{Lexi Ploc-Canning pictured in Newfoundland aged eight}

Though water-damaged, the message in the bottle was legible enough to show Ms Ploc-Canning’s name. 

The couple then connected with her through Instagram, and eventually, Ms Ploc-Canning organised a trip to the very beach where her bottle was discovered. 

She said she was ‘very shocked’ when the Bourkes made contact saying they had discovered it 24 years after she tossed it into the ocean.

“I had been staying in Costa Rica for a while and I was just leaving and it was a very magical place that I was staying in,” she said. 

“Then I get this message and it the reminder that  I needed in that moment that magic is everywhere, no matter where I go, that it’s always going to happen, that it’s always present.”

An avid animal enthusiast, Ms Ploc-Canning, was very taken by the scenery in West Mayo before returning home to Canada last Thursday. 

“I love it, it’s probably one of my favourite places that I’ve been. The land is beautiful, the people are amazing, the culture and all of it,” she said. 

“I could not even have imagined it in my wildest dreams. The fact that I’m here and the letter is here is so surreal.”

Though she will remain in Canada for the foreseeable future, Ms Ploc-Canning is already dreaming of one day opening a farm centre in West Mayo.

“I need to think about it all and look into all of that. I have been looking at getting a VISA too to come here for years and see really if I like it before I decide to do something like that,” she said.