An 11-year-old Michigan girl vacationing with her family in Florida found a message in a bottle that had purportedly been thrown into the ocean 8 years earlier in Hawaii.
Hoqwell, Mich., resident Josie Law, 11, was on Florida’s Anna Maria Island when she spotted the bottle in the surf.
“I was just walking, and the waves were coming up, and it was washing on shore,” Law told WTSP-TV. “The wave went like a crash into each other and went back, so then I grabbed it really quickly and I showed my mom.”
The bottle contained a small note, reading: “Hello, people who found this. You will be happy that you found this. Why? Because you will know me with this number.”
Law’s mother, Paris Hoisington sent a text message to the phone number included in the note.
She soon received a response from a 21-year-old Hawaii woman who told her she and her brother had thrown the bottle into the ocean off Oahu eight years earlier.
“And I said, ‘you’re kidding,'” Hoisington told WFTV.
The note’s author, who did not want to be identified, said she was 13 when she and her brother had the idea.
“Yes, we did this when we were 13 and 8 years old. It was something fun we did because we found a message in a bottle before we had decided to make our own in 2018,” she said. “It was super fun to see that our bottle ended up all the way in Florida and that they ended up reaching out to us. Definitely did not expect that to happen.”
Bobby Deskins, chief meteorologist for WTSP-TV, said that while it seems unlikely that the bottle floated all the way from Hawaii to Florida, it is “technically possible.”
“Everyone has got their own theories,” Hoisington said. “But Mother Nature is the only one to count for this — because without her, I don’t think it would’ve traveled that far.”
