Josie Law holds a bag containing the note and bottle she found on a beach in May. 

Shutterstock.com (beach, background); Courtesy of family (Josie Law)

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Lost and Found

September 15, 2025
By Alicia Green

Jim McMahon/Mapman®

Josie Law loves going to the beach to look for seashells, shark teeth, and sand dollars. But in May, the 11-year-old from Howell, Michigan, found something much more special: a message in a bottle. It had been dropped into the ocean almost seven years earlier.

Josie and her family were on vacation on Anna Maria Island in Florida when the small bottle washed ashore. Inside Josie found two paper birds and a handwritten message. A phone number and the date August 17, 2018 were written near the bottom.

Josie’s mom sent a text to the number. She was surprised to get a reply—from a 21-year-old woman in Hawaii! The woman and her younger brother had tossed the bottle into the Pacific Ocean when they were kids. 

“I can’t believe that they responded,” Josie says. 

A Long Journey

How did the bottle travel thousands of miles from Hawaii to Florida? No one knows for sure, but one possibility is that it traveled through the Panama Canal. The human-made waterway connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The bottle might have gotten stuck to the bottom of a ship or pushed along by ocean currents. 

Josie knows it isn’t a good idea to put bottles in the ocean. They can be harmful to fish, sea turtles, and other marine life. Still, finding a message in a bottle is an experience she won’t forget.

“I’m going to keep it forever,” Josie says. 

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