Student's message in bottle found 21 years later

Merle Brandell and his black lab Slapsey were beachcombing along the Bering Sea when he spied a plastic bottle among the Japanese glass floats he often finds along the shore of his tiny Alaskan fishing village.

He walked over and saw an envelope tucked inside. After slicing the bottle open, Brandell found a message from an elementary school student in a suburb of Seattle. The fact that the letter traveled 1,735 miles without any help from the U.S. postal service is unusual, but that's only the beginning of the mystery.

About 21 years passed between the time Emily Hwaung put the message in a soda bottle and Merle Brandell picked it up on the beach.



"This letter is part of our science project to study oceans and learn about people in distant lands," she wrote. "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."

After some searching, Degginger discovered Emily Hwaung is now a 30-year-old accountant named Emily Shih who now lives in Seattle. She was in the 4th grade during the 1986-87 school year at a school building that closed more than a year ago.

Brandell has a theory about how the bottle ended up on the shore of Nelson Lagoon and how the letter remained so readable after its 21 years in transit. Maybe the bottle didn't spend those years in the water. It might have blown his way quickly and then remained buried in the mud for years.