A real treasure trove

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Experts weigh in on chances of an El Niño this summer, a message in a bottle takes exactly a year to arrive, and 3 new records set in the world of rock ‘n’ roll collectibles🤘

Let’s get into it!

According to the U.S. National Weather Service, there’s a 62% an El Niño event will hit between June and August.

El Niño refers to warming waters at the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The NWS forecasters mostly anticipate a moderate warming, but also said last week that there’s a chance it could be significant.

One of those forecasters is meteorologist Ben Noll, who thinks there’s a 98% there will be an El Niño event but it will be moderate. That’s the designation when surface temperatures rise 1.8 to 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

A super El Niño occurs when surface temperatures rise 3.6 degrees F or more, and would likely lead to potentially catastrophic and “supercharged” extreme weather events.

El Niño is a phase of the Pacific Ocean’s climate cycle that sees warmer water pushed towards the west coast of the United States. Once it arrives, warmer waters could bring a summer that’s hotter and drier than usual to the northern United States and Canada, creating the conditions for wild fires in areas that haven’t received sufficient precipitation this winter.

The western and southern United States, on the other hand, could experience a hotter and wetter summer, reversing drought conditions but potentially stoking flood risks.

Late Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay had a passion for rock ‘n’ roll and spent years building a collection of nearly priceless items from the genre’s history.

Many of those items were auctioned off by Christie’s in New York last week, with three of them breaking the previous record for the highest price ever paid for a guitar.

The previous record was held by Kurt Cobain’s Martin D-18E ($6 million), which he played during Nirvana’s immortal MTV: Unplugged set in 1994.

The record now belongs to David Gilmour’s “Black Strat,” which is the 1970 Fender Stratocaster he bought at New York’s Manny’s in 1970, and subsequently proceeded to record every Pink Floyd album from Dark Side of the Moon to The Final Cut with it.

The bidding war lasted 21 minutes, and the guitar sold for $14.5 million, obliterating the Cobain record. That record was also beat by another Cobain guitar: the Fender Mustang he used to record Smells Like Teen Spirit, which sold for $6.9 million.

In second place, however, was Jerry Garcia’s Tiger, which fetched $11.5 million, nearly doubling the previous record and helping to establish a new baseline in one-of-a-kind guitar collecting.

Irsay passed away last year, but in 2020 he commented on how important it was to him that all the memorabilia in his touring museum was available to be seen and touched by the general public. 🤘

While we think nothing about sending a message to the other side of the planet in mere seconds, it’s almost unimaginable to consider a message in a bottle making its way 4,000 miles from Nassau, Bahamas to Porto, Portugal.

But that’s exactly what happened when Amy Bisterzo and her 10-year-old son Lorenzo of Fort Old Bay, Nassau placed a message in a bottle and included their WhatsApp numbers, names, and location, before casting it into the great big sea on Feb. 10, 2025.

Almost exactly a year later on Feb. 12, 2026, a 49-year-old teacher named Maria Enes was walking her dog on Vila Chã Beach near Porto, when her “childhood fantasy” of a real-life message in a bottle appeared.

“As it said 2025 and it was so new I thought it was from the area and I took it home with me,” she said. “I took the paper with tweezers and I was astonished that it came from the Bahamas— exactly one year had passed. “I thought it was awesome and I called the number in the note.”

A random number calling from Portugal appeared on Bisterzo’s phone, which she dismissed, and then a message was sent, saying “I found your bottle.”

“I shouted upstairs to Lorenzo ‘someone found our bottle,’” she said. “Because it was so long ago he didn’t know what I was talking about and then I showed him. Then I started to communicate with Maria, and she sent voice notes and videos, and very quickly I realized this woman was so kind and lovely.”

The newly connected friends of destiny say they hope to meet one day in Vila Chã Beach, where they can write a new bottled message and throw it in the ocean together.

’78 sure was great

Let’s keep rolling with our look back to the ’70s as we remember this week in 1978, with today’s trivia.

Give today’s game a try and you might just win a $25 e-gift card.

Winner will be notified on Tuesday afternoon. Keep an eye on your inbox and don’t forget to check your spam folder! *