"Eve kept asking me if someone had emailed," Gibbons told The Press and Journal newspaper. "I had to say that the chances were slim and that it might never be found, but she kept asking."
Gibbons said she received an email last week from a fisherman named Sven who said he found the bottle in the sand on a beach in Feoy, a small Norwegian island 300 miles across the North Sea.
She said her daughter was overjoyed to finally learn of the bottle's fate.
"She even printed it off and took it to school where they looked up information about the island. She was so happy with it.," she said. "I really wasn't sure if it would ever be found. I've been quite surprised."
A North Carolina girl whose message in a bottle was launched into the ocean about 40 miles off the shore of the state learned earlier this year that her bottle had washed up on a beach in Ireland, about 3,500 miles away.
