In the ports Statsraad Lehmkuhl visits, schoolchildren are invited to share how they experience climate change affecting the environment where they live. They do this by handing over a message in a bottle to the captain.
A message in a bottle is something we usually associate with an emergency, something cast into the sea by a shipwrecked person asking for help when no other means of communication exist. During the One Ocean Expedition, messages in bottles are also being sent out, but here the emergency messages come from children to adults.
130 schoolchildren
Also in La Paz, the ship received messages in bottles.
– Message in a Bottle can be anything from nice drawings to video productions. And yes, it’s very moving to see how engaged the kids are. There’s no doubt that the generation growing up now has much more on their agenda than my generation ever did, says Captain Jens Joachim Hiorth.
Three school classes came on board in La Paz, 130 children. Jens Joachim was handed the messages, and one of the students explained what they had created and how they had approached the task.
– I haven’t had the chance to go through everything yet, but what I have seen so far is wonderful, Jens says with a smile. We even received a bottle ship, they had made a little ship and placed it inside a bottle! They may have had a bit of help with that, because that’s not exactly easy. But it was fantastic, and I’m looking forward to seeing everything displayed.
And that is the plan.
All the Message in a Bottle -items will be exhibited during One Ocean Week when Statsraad Lehmkuhl returns to her home port of Bergen, Norway, in April 2026. The messages will also be available to view on the One Ocean Expedition website.
A tour on board
After the handover, the children were shown around the sailing ship. For that, Captain Jens Joachim needed help.
– These were young children who only speak Spanish. Fortunately, our science coordinator Natacha speaks Spanish, so she did an excellent job showing all 130 of them around and explaining everything.
An important part
The purpose of the One Ocean Expedition is to raise awareness and share knowledge about the ocean, and Message in a Bottle is an important part of this.
– I think it’s an important project because it supports the whole idea behind the One Ocean Expedition, to reach everyone, from the very youngest to the very oldest, all the way up to heads of state in the most extreme case. So Message in a Bottle is a very important element, especially because it’s we adults who have created the mess. And then comes a generation after us that unfortunately has to deal with the problems, says Jens Joachim.
– But with the level of engagement they show, there might be hope. Still, they will need some help to get started. We have a lot of work left to make things as easy as possible for them when the baton is passed on.
Hope for the future?
Jens Joachim believes the next generation will manage to clean up.
– Yes, I do. I mean, I have two little girls myself, and if I didn’t have hope, I would sink into some kind of deep depression. So of course I have hope for the next generation.
