Sunday, September 14, 2008

In the wake of Hurricane Ike, there's a good chance Bart Michelini, Brian Anthony and a few other bottle hunters will be scouring Florida Keys beaches.

The Upper Keys residents are regular "swamp trompers," free-thinking adventurers who slog through the muck and mangrove tangles along the Florida Keys' ocean-facing barrier islands and scour the hardwood uplands where old homes and farms stood 100 years ago.

Their goal is treasure -- in the form of bottles.

Michelini, a Jewfish Road resident, stumbled into his bottle-collecting hobby a few years ago.

"The first bottle I found was purple," Michelini said. "It caught my eye. I picked it up and took it home and looked it up online. It was made with magenta, and I realized it was sunburned glass. It had been in the sun for years."

He learned that between 1880 and 1915, U.S. glassmakers regularly purchased magenta from Germany. But with the advent of World War I, they turned to selenium, which made glass clear.

Excited by his discovery, Michelini introduced fellow commercial fisherman and friend Anthony, who lives in Tavernier, to bottle hunting.

"Bart got me into it. We were hiking along El Radabob Key and found a hurricane line," Anthony said. "We walked the line and found lots of old bottles. We just picked up bottles on the surface. It's pretty neat when you find an old blue bottle in the woods."

Those bottles, even shards of old glass, are becoming harder to find washed ashore. An article in the August edition of National Geographic Magazine points out that red and orange bottles and shards are the most rare, while white -- once clear glass -- is the most common.

"Blame it on plastic," the article states. "Sea glass -- the bright bits of old bottles scoured by sand and saltwater -- is getting increasingly difficult to find."

Recycling and the predominance of plastic bottles has reduced the volume of glass dumped into the oceans each year. Michelini's collection, however, makes National Geographic's concern for sea glass seem overblown. Forget those shards. He has whole bottles. Some, in fact, are valued at between $200 and $400 by collectors.

In Michelini's Key Largo home are several collections, like schools of identical-colored fish. Three dozen old, blue Milk of Magnesia bottles sit on a stand, brown syrup bottles are shoulder-to-shoulder under a tree outside, and even a few rare glass balls that Japanese, Spanish and Norwegian fishermen use as floats are there.

Michelini's collection did not grow by accident. He works at it and he's developed a method.

"You go after a storm, like treasure hunting. It exposes the bottles that have been buried," he said. "I haven't started to dig yet because the pickings have been so good. I've found some good ones, some old ones made before 1800. I've been looking harder now that they are increasing in value."

He admits to a friendly competition with Anthony when they go bottle hunting.

"It's a good feeling when Brian finds one, but I get a little jealous," Michelini admits. "I guess he gets a little jealous of me when I find one, but there's a real sense of adventure, of treasure hunting, when you look for old bottles."

Michelini said he wonders about things like how many people touched the bottle and how far it traveled before landing on the beach.

"I've found a spot where there were seven bottles with notes in them. I answered some of the notes. One was poetry from some Cuban freedom fighters," he said. "It's fun to correspond and learn their stories. Brian still corresponds with people in Switzerland that sent out a bottle with a note he answered some years ago."

Like any treasure, its value is often in the eyes of the finder. According to bottlebooks.com, the value of old bottles is based on 12 factors: supply and demand; age; rarity; condition; color; aesthetic appeal; embossing and design; category; size; individuality; historic significance; and locale.

"Color is listed fifth, but plays a major role in the value of an old bottle," the Web site explains. "First, there is a hierarchy of colors that appeal to most bottle collectors, the most unusual colors bringing the highest prices. The second way color influences value [is] that bottles sometime occur in a color that is unusual for that bottle. For example, a scarce medicine like Tom's Russian Liniment -- most often is seen in aqua -- is occasionally found in a rich dark olive green which sells for 10 times the price of the aqua bottle. Even common bottles in a rare color variant will be in greater demand and worth more."

The most highly valued colors are puce, cobalt, purple, yellow and yellow-green.

Michelini and Anthony don't care as much about the price tags their collections carry as they do the value of the hunt and the trophies in their homes. Michelini stores his favorite and most valuable bottles inside his Florida room in two large display cases. They are for his pleasure and that of his friends.

For more information on bottle collecting, go to bottlebooks.com, prostockdetectors.com and home-and-garden.webshots.com.

sgibbs@keysnews.com