The couple who found it has connected with the boy who tossed it in the ocean.
A bottle with a handwritten message in it that originated from Ocean City, Maryland, three years ago was found on the beaches near Belfast, Northern Ireland recently, Irish Central reported.
Ciaran Marron and Rita Simmonds, who are from Belfast, found the glass bottle, which had a message in it as well as U.S. dollar bills, on a beach in County Donegal earlier this month, Irish Central reported.
“We knew, anyway, we had a message in a bottle, so we got really excited,” Marron told NBC Washington.
"It's like a childhood dream to find something like this," Simmonds told Donegal Daily. “We've found amazing things on the beach before, like fossils and stones, but never anything like this.”
The couple read the handwritten note which was penned by Sasha Yonyak of Maryland, who tossed it in the Atlantic Ocean in 2019 with his neighbor Mr. Wayne, NBC Washington reported.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Marron told NBC Washington. “It’s something you sort of dream of as a kid, you know, to find this bottle and take you on some magical trip.”
After getting the bottle, the Northern Irish couple found the little boy’s father on Facebook and began chatting with him.
“It’s just meant to be, about Sasha,” Simmonds told NBC Washington. “The universe has just brought us together.”
Through conversations with the boy’s father, they found out that Mr. Wayne, who was their elderly neighbor, passed away in 2021.
Sasha was 11 when the experiment was conducted and is now 14, but says he plans to stay in touch with his new friends from across the globe and hopes to meet them in person one day, NBC Washington reported.
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