The HMAS Sydney was secretly carrying a bottle of whisky all this time.
The HMAS Sydney was secretly carrying a bottle of whisky all this time. US Navy

Back in 1982, at a shipyard in Seattle, the team building the HMAS Sydney left a surprise for someone in the ship’s mast—a six-year-old bottle of MacNaughton Canadian whisky. They wrote the date on the bottle: April 10, 1982.

Thirty-five years later, it was still there. In 2015, the ship was de-commissioned and taken to a yard in Henderson, Australia, to be taken apart.

A former employee of the Seattle shipyard let the crew there in on the secret. They cut into the mast, and there they found “a small bottle of whisky wrapped in pipe insulation in the forward starboard leg of the main mast,” reports the Weekend Courier.

The whisky was in the mast all along!
The whisky was in the mast all along! Reddit

The whisky is now aged 41 years, and the team plans to break into it soon—no word yet about how well it’s aged in its sloshing years at sea.