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Neptune Notes
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By Dan Beard

Kite at Boothbay Tows a Plank.

While spending summer at Ocean Point, near Boothbay, Maine, the author sent up an ordinary Japanese hawk kite and attached the string to a nail in a piece of plank was placed in the ocean. The plank presented resistance enough to keep the kite aloft, and it sailed away past Squirrel Island, Pumpkin Rock, and out to sea.

Two days afterward when the mackerel fleet came into port, the writer learned that the crew of one of the smacks had been surprised to find a kite floating from a line tangled in the rigging of the main-mast. Where it came from was a mystery, until the skipper and the writer chanced to meet while the latter was making a drawing of the mackerel fishers.

Someone in New Jersey once sent a kite out to sea attached to a float, and it was picked up on the coast of Virginia.

Notes to Neptune.

Boys who live near the lakeside or seashore, or who visit these places for their vacation, can send messages out to sea whenever the wind is "off shore," that is, blowing from the shore toward the sea.

Address the note to Mr. Neptune, Atlantic Ocean or Pacific Ocean or Lake Erie, according to the location of the sender. The contents can be worded to suit the taste of the writer, but it should end up with a request that the finder communicate with the sender and tell him when, where, and under what conditions the note was found; and do not forget to give your address as carefully as you do when writing to someone for an autograph.

Seal the note and enclose it in some water-proof material or a tightly corked bottle. Lash the package or bottle securely to a short plank and drive a nail securely in one end of the plank.

After sending up your kite attach the string to the nail and let the plank go out to sea. If no accident happens to your kite it is almost certain to attract some one's attention, and as a rule any one receiving such a message at sea will enter into the spirit of the thing and send a reply on the first opportunity. In this manner you can learn how far the kite traveled with its tow.

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