Nov. 19 (UPI) -- A Florida man who found a message in a bottle washed up on the beach was able to contact the author of the letter: a Swiss man who threw the bottle into the ocean in the Canary Islands.
Glenn Vincent of Daytona Beach said he spotted the bottle on shore during a recent storm and carefully removed the water-logged message inside.
Vincent said he had to wait for the pieces of the paper to dry so he could glue them back together and read the message.
The bottle had been launched by Cyrill Mattle, a Switzerland native who had tossed the bottle into the ocean in the Canary Islands in March 2019.
Vincent was able to contact Mattle using an email address included in the letter. Mattle said he had actually tossed about a half dozen messages in bottles into the ocean on the same day. He said he previously heard from someone who found one of his bottles in Turks and Caicos.
"I drop them out to see if someone finds it and also I think it's good, good fun to reply and see who else is behind the story," Mattle told WESH-TV.
Another Florida family revealed just days earlier that they had found a message in a bottle on an overgrown island across from their home in Flagler Beach.
Katie Bodiford said the message had been written by a child in Cuba and tossed into the water during Hurricane Irma in 2017.
