Message in a bottle from Massachusetts reaches West Indies

July 17 (UPI) -- A University of Michigan student visiting an island in the West Indies discovered a message in a bottle that had been launched off the Massachusetts coast nearly 10 years earlier.

Cassidy Beach said she was studying on the island of South Caicos in April when she found the bottle among some marine debris on a cliff.

Beach and her classmates broke the bottle open and discovered a message dated Sept. 30, 2004. The author, Pennel Ames, explained it had been thrown into the Atlantic Ocean off the Nantucket coast.

Beach and her friends did some research online and discovered Ames had thrown multiple bottles into the ocean while working as a commercial fisherman, and the messages had been found in locations including Louisiana, Bermuda, Cuba, England, Ireland and France.

The message included an address for a reply, and Beach wrote in her letter that she would be in Woods Hole, Mass., for a summer internship with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Ames and his wife, Sharon, invited Beach to join them at their Surfside cottage for dinner. They said it was only the second time they had been able to meet someone who found one of their messages.

The couple said the bottle was the oldest in terms of the time that elapsed between its launching and being found, and was also among the farthest-traveled of their bottles.