Twenty-one years ago, a suburban Seattle elementary school science class signed type-written messages, put them in bottles, and dropped them in Puget Sound. Earlier this month, Merle Brandell, a bear hunter in Alaska found one of the soda bottles in the Bering Sea and was intrigued by the message. The letter read:

[This letter] is part of our science project to study oceans and learn about people in distant lands.Please send the date and location of the bottle with your address. I will send you my picture and tell you when and where the bottle was placed in the ocean. Your friend, Emily Hwaung.

Brandell, who discovered the message, did his part to try and contact the little girl who wrote the letter. However, his calls to the North City School, which was identified in the letter, went unanswered. So Brandell sent the school district a letter, and was surprised to discover the North City School was long closed and the little girl who had written the letter was now a woman. Emily Hwaung, is now Emily Shih and is a 30-year-old accountant who still calls Seattle home.

The letter in the soda bottle traveled over 1,700 miles before being discovered. The message was sent during the 1986-87 school year and spent over 20 years in transit before its discovery late last year.