Girl Finds a Message in a Bottle. Her Mom Can’t Believe What Happens When They Text the Number on the Note

NEED TO KNOW

• An 11-year-old Michigan girl recently found a message in a bottle while vacationing with her family in Florida

• The note, which was written in 2018, included a phone number

• The girl and her mother reached out to the note’s original sender and found out that it came all the way from Hawaii

A girl found a message in a bottle while vacationing with her family — and the family was shocked when they realized where it came from.

Josie Law, 11, of Howell, Mich., was on Anna Maria Island in Florida when she made the unusual discovery.

“I was just walking, and the waves were coming up, and [the bottle] was washing on shore,” Josie told local news station Tampa Bay 10.

“The waves went like a crash into each other and went back, so then I grabbed it really quickly and I showed my mom,” she said. “I thought it was a piece of trash, and then I saw the note in a bottle and I was like, ‘It’s a note in a bottle.’ ”

Josie went on to tell the outlet that she and her mother opened the bottle and pulled out a note dated Aug. 17, 2018.

“Hello, people who found this. You will be happy that you found this. Why? Because you will know me with this number” the note read, followed by a phone number.

Josie’s mother, Paris Hoisington, said she decided to text the phone number as opposed to call it — and she and Josie were shocked when they received a text back from a 21-year-old woman in Hawaii.

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The woman — who wished to remain anonymous — told Tampa Bay 10 that she and her younger brother wrote the message when they were 13 and 8, respectively.

“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,” she said.

As to how the bottle ended up thousands of miles from Hawaii?

Bobby Deskins, Tampa Bay 10’s chief meteorologist said it was “technically possible,” even though the odds were extremely low.

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“It would generally have to go north out of Hawaii to get into this current, come back down the West Coast of the United States, crossover, and head over through the Philippines and then over towards the southwest coast of South America,” he began.

“Go underneath South America and then up along this current on the West Coast of Africa up into the intertropical convergence zone where our hurricanes sometimes come from and then back up through the Caribbean by the Bahamas and up towards Anna Maria Island,” he added.

And while the notes’ authors enjoyed learning that someone had received their message from the past, they also said that they would no longer recommend that others attempt to do the same.

“We do not want to encourage others to do this because it is littering and illegal! We did not know this at the time, as we were young kids and copying something that someone else had done before us,” they told the Tampa 10.

Read the original article on People