50 women, ceased the practice in response to public complaints and an investigation by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. In January 2018, a couple walking on a beach in Western Australia discovered a bottled message that had been launched on June 12, 1886, from the German barque conducting drift bottle experiments for the German Naval Observatory. The message's authenticity was corroborated through the ship captain's original Meteorological Journal, and, at 131 years' duration, eclipsed the previous corroborated record duration of 108 years. The bottle's thick glass and its opening's narrow bore are thought to have protected the paper from the elements. In the summer of 2018, a bottled typewritten message dated March 26, 1930, was discovered in the roof of the twelfth-century Goslar Cathedral in Goslar, Germany, signed by four roofers who bemoaned the economic state of that country. The bottle was discovered by a roofer who was the grandson of one of the signatories, who had been an 18-year-old roofing apprentice in 1930. Goslar's mayor replaced the bottle with a copy of the 1930 message, adding his own confidential message. In May 2019, a Gatorade bottle with a four-page letter, written in Spanish, was found in Brown Bay, near Mount Gambier, South Australia. The letter had been sent from Caleta Córdoba, near Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina by a mother and two children as a loving tribute to their husband and father who had died of a stroke a year earlier. In June 2019, three hikers trapped above a waterfall on California's Arroyo Seco tributary released a Nalgene bottled SOS message that was quickly discovered a quarter mile (0.4 km) downstream, allowing them to be rescued by helicopter the following morning. In late 2019, a bottled message launched on August 1, 1994, by 12-year-old Ryan Mead was found near the mouth of the Taramakau River, New Zealand, the find occurring mere months after Mead died at age 37 in a freak accident inhaling fumes while laying carpet. Long-duration events s denotes stationary messages (placed on land, not in a body of water). Popular perceptions Besides interest in citizen science drift-bottle experiments, message-in-a-bottle lore has often been of a romantic or poetic nature. Such messages have been romanticized in literature, from Edgar Allan Poe's 1833 story "MS. Found in a Bottle" through Nicholas Sparks' 1998 Message in a Bottle. Clint Buffington, subject of the 2019 documentary short film The Tides That Bind