A 10-year-old New Jersey boy who threw a champagne bottle with a message in it into the Tom?s River after Thanksgiving three years ago received a letter from a teenager on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas. The letter in the bottle was torn and parts were barely legible, but the teen, Marco O'Brain Taylor , was able to make out an address and write that he had found the bottle on the beach. Champagne bottles are unusual on the beaches of the Bahamas, compelling him to pick it up, although he misunderstood the purpose of the letter, thinking that by responding to it he would get a monetary reward or a trip to the U.S. Still, correspondence between the two has started, and each hope one day to visit the other?s country.

Breck Owens, a senior scientist with the Massachusetts-based, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said oceanography studies using small floating devices show that the coastal currents off of New Jersey flow slowly toward the south. "The length of time it took the bottle to get there isn't surprising and is comparable to our studies," Owens said. Over the three-year period, the bottle traveled more than 2,000 miles at a maximum speed of two nautical miles per day. The bottle's most probable course of travel would have taken it south off the coast of Cape Hatteras, N.C.; there the Gulf Stream would have picked it up and pulled the bottle east toward Europe. Currents in the middle of the ocean would have circled the bottle back toward the southeast and down toward the Bahamas where, due to Eleuthera protruding farthest east in the island chain, it finally made landfall.