Daughter Receives Father's Message In A Bottle 5 Decades After He Sent It Out To Sea

October 26, 2016

A message in a bottle sent out to sea by a New Hampshire man more than five decades ago was found 1,500 miles away and has been returned to his daughter.

The long lost message was discovered by Clint Buffington of Utah while he was vacationing in the Turks and Caicos.

Buffington says he found a Coke bottle half-buried in the sand that "looked like it had been there since the beginning of time." The note inside the bottle said, "Return to 419 Ocean Blvd. and receive a reward of $150 from Tina, owner of the Beachcomber."

The Beachcomber was a Hampton motel owned by the now-deceased parents of Paula Pierce in 1960. Pierce’s father had written the note as a joke and cast it into the Atlantic Ocean.

Buffington flew to New Hampshire to deliver the message to Pierce.

"And it just hit me, it was my father's writing. And I was shocked," Pierce said.

She insisted on living up to her father's promise, giving Buffington that reward. But the biggest reward is the message in a bottle finding its way back home.

"The significance of the message in the bottle was not lost on him. It took him to find it, and it took him to come across the country and bring it to me," Pierce said.