By IANS,
London : A Scottish man has been reunited with his message in a bottle which he had thrown into the sea some 23 years ago, the Daily Telegraph has reported.
Donald Wylie was 11 years old in 1985, when he threw the bottle into the sea off Orkney in northern Scotland with a message asking its finder to pass it to him.
More than two decades later, the bottle was unearthed by a group of volunteers cleaning up a beach at West Sands in St. Andrews – a town on the east coast of Fife council in Scotland.
After finding the message, the team that included students and staff from the University of St. Andrews searched for the sender and finally tracked down Wylie, now aged 33 and living in Orkney.
Wylie, who is working as a civil engineer, confirmed that he was the man who sent the message and recalled how his mother asked him to throw hundreds of message in bottles.
“Over the years I’ve had a few replies, usually from Norway or Denmark, but never one from St. Andrews and never one that’s taken this long to wash up,” he said.
“The message in a bottle was really quite a find and surprised us all, and we’re delighted to be able to reunite the owner with this piece of history,” said Roddy Yarr, environment and energy manager for the University of St. Andrews.
“It really is quite remarkable that the bottle should be found after all this time – who knows where it has travelled to in the last quarter of a century,” he added.