Message in a bottle buddies meet at last

Photo / Thinkstock

A Kiwi skipper who threw a message in a bottle into the remote Pacific Ocean on a round-the-world voyage 12 years ago has had an emotional meeting with the woman who discovered it.

Jason Edmunds was sailing in the Galapagos Islands in 1999. After drinking a bottle of red as the sun set, he wrote a message and turfed the oceangram overboard.

Four years later and 9000 nautical miles away, Australian student Anita Matthews, then 13, saw the bottle washed up on North West Island, off the central Queensland coast.

She could see a message was stuck inside so she and her parents wrapped it in a towel and smashed it against rocks to get it out.

Matthews wrote to Edmunds to say: "You may find this extraordinary but so do I because I have never found a message in the bottle."

The pair struck up a friendship, and Matthews travelled to Australia to meet Anita and her mother Sue on the Sunshine Coast at Christmas.

Scientists believe the bottle travelled north through the South Pacific Gyre off the Galapagos Islands, then into the East Australian Current, before approaching the South Equatorial Current and possibly weaving through Fiji, Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

Edmunds was sailing a 48m catamaran from Spain to Auckland ahead of the America's Cup when he threw the bottle.

He said he received the first letter from Matthews just before the birth of his daughter, Ocean, now aged 7. Edmunds and Matthews' mother became Facebook friends, and he promised to get in touch when he was in Australia.

"Once I did meet them, there were things that we had very much in common, I've been looking for people like that for years."