(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-03-24 10:04

She said she was flabbergasted by the news and immediately shared it with her Kirkland co-workers.

"I don't remember the project. It was so long ago. Elementary school is kind of foggy," Shih admitted.

The project may have been more memorable if each child had created her own message and personally dropped it in the water, but the letters from Carol Aguayo's fourth grade class were typed. The students only added their names and signed them, then a friend carried the bottles on his boat and dropped them in the ocean.

"It took away a little of the mystique," Shih said of the form letter.

She also was a little chagrined by the offer to mail a photo to whomever found the letter and by the environmental implications of dropping plastic bottles in the ocean, and noted that times have changed a lot in 21 years.

"I've had a good laugh about that with all my friends," Shih said.

As she was sharing her story with friends and co-workers, Shih realized how rare it was for a message in a bottle to arrive safely somewhere.

"Many of them had tried to do it themselves, but you never hear of one coming back. The odds are so low that you'll ever hear back from somebody," Shih said. "It was just kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing."

Brandell has a theory about how the bottle ended up on the shore of Nelson Lagoon and how the letter remained so readable after its 21 years in transit. Maybe the bottle didn't spend those years in the water. It might have blown his way quickly and then remained buried in the mud for years.

It was found among some Japanese floats that took a similar journey many years ago. They don't really wash ashore. They extrude out of the mud and into the hands of beachcombers, who sell them on eBay or craft jewelry out of them like Brandell's mother does.

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