Smith, now 12, received a reply last week in the form of a letter postmarked from Canada.
The letter's author said she found the bottle in Halifax, Nova Scotia, about 2,915 miles from Cooden Beach.
"It's incredible. We never expected anything like this," Smith's mother, Roxanne, told the Bexhill-On-Sea Observer.
"This lady in Canada had written back, and it had Alexa's original message in the envelope," the mother said. "She wrote this lovely letter saying, 'I hope you have half as much adventure as this message did.'"
Roxanne said the woman did not include her own contact information so the family could thank her.
"Sadly she didn't include a return address, I think it was just a lady wanting to do a nice thing for a young kid," she said. "Alexa loves it. It's her prized possession now."
The mother said the message in a bottle thrown out to sea by her sons was previously found at a nearby Bexhill beach shortly after it was tossed. She said two more messages in bottles remain unaccounted for.
"Maybe we'll get another message in a few more years," Roxanne said.
A Florida charter boat captain discovered a message in a bottle earlier this month off Cape Canaveral. Capt. Tyler Vollmer of Fired Up Fishing Charters said the heart-shaped bottle contained handwritten lyrics to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" along with a personalized message from "Emily" to "Rory."
The message in Vollmer's bottle was dated Feb. 14, 2006, but didn't offer any contact information for the author.
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- Jim Croce
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