Reunited with Bernie the Buoy

Posted on 17 May 2010

The Golden Tulip hotel casts a long shadow along the beach where Fortaleza’s fishermen have landed their morning catch. The crowd assembles in circles around the fist to haggle over prices as leathery-skinned men place weights on scales like opponents moving pieces in a game of chess.

The market is a raucous celebration of arrival and return. Fishmongers work at wooden stalls on the sand, scraping, chopping and slicing while maintaining a steady banter with their customers. Women sit at plastic tables selling coffee from thermos flasks, tapioca biscuits and shots of cachaca to fisherman tired after days at sea. A fish flung through the air noisily collides with a man’s cheek and he turns drunkenly to berate the uninterested crowd. Behind the beach beside the Golden Tulip’s pool, Moises, the pool attendant has also started his day’s work. It was Moises who, on a morning much like today, recovered our buoy from the fish market. As a result of his discovery we have come to Fortaleza to find volunteers to respond to the letters carried across the ocean in our buoy.

It is a fun story to narrate and as it unfolds our audiences become animated, struck by its serendipity and the feeling that the buoy has somehow chosen them. Alessandro, the son of a manager at the Golden Tulip, confessed “I thought the letters would be boring at first but once I started reading I couldn’t stop. I wanted to reply to all of them.”

The letters, written around the Atlantic from Scotland to Ghana, present very different experiences of life at the ocean’s edge. Students at the Berlitz language school in Fortaleza struggled with some of the more exotic vocabulary. The word ‘sword’ appears in letters from Scottish students anxious not to be confused with the hairy cast of Braveheart; as do the names of several West African tribes, the ‘Wollof’, ‘Mandinka’ and ‘Ashanti’. People remarked at the historical bookmarks, situating the letters in time; references to Michael Jackson’s death and Barack Obama intended to help a reader discovering the buoy in many years time, are still current.

Bernie the Buoy is a little worn from his voyage, marked with the scars of molluscs and barnacles. However, he is fit for another adventure and we are taking him with us to Canada where we will repeat the experiment in the North Atlantic.

We now have the buoy’s satellite tracker in our car so you will be able to follow us on our map to see exactly where we are.






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