After 50 years, 2,000 miles, bottled message goes home

HAMPTON BEACH, N.H. – A message in a bottle traveled thousands of miles and as many as 50 years before finding its way back to the author’s daughter.

Paula Pierce has lived her life by the ocean. Recently, it delivered a message.

“It was like being contacted from the past,” she said.

That message came in a bottle. And it took decades to find its way back to the Beachcomber Motel, her family’s business, reports CBS Boston.

“It just jumped up off the page at me and I was like that’s my father’s writing. That is my father’s writing,” Pierce said.

Sometime between 1960 and 1980, Paula’s father wrote on a piece of paper and put it in a Coca Cola bottle.

It reads “Return it to 419 Ocean boulevard and receive a reward of $150 from Tina, owner of Beachcomber.”

Tina is Paula’s mother. She thinks her dad wrote it to tease his business-savvy wife.

Somehow the bottle made it all the way to the Island of Turks and Caicos where Clint Buffington found it. He is an English tutor from Kentucky who collects messages in a bottle and tries to find the owner.

Paula learned of the message in the bottle when a reporter from Seacoast Online contacted her.

“A message from the past like this carries special weight and I’m just really glad to be part of that,” Buffington told CBS Boston.

The Associated Press reports Buffington flew to New Hampshire to deliver the message to Pierce. She made good on the promised reward.

Traveling direct, it’s about 2000 miles to Turks and Caicos, but no one knows how many miles that bottle logged for the up to 50 years it spent in the Atlantic Ocean.

Paula’s parents passed away years ago. She misses them terribly and thinks there may be a bigger reason the bottle finally surfaced now.

“That gave me chills today. I actually started to cry,” she said. “I feel like they’re sending me a message somehow.”

Her father may have meant the message as a practical joke. Instead, he gave his daughter a priceless gift.