Mystery message in a bottle returned to sender after 50 years

Bottle had been at sea for decades before being discovered and finally returned home - earning the finder a $150 reward promised years before

Clint Buffington found the message in a Coke bottle while in holiday in the Turks and Caicos (Clint Buffington)

A man who found a message in a bottle on a Caribbean beach has returned it to the family of its sender – 50 years after it was thrown into the Atlantic.

Clint Buffington, who lives in Utah, USA, found the glass Coca Cola bottle in 2011 while walking along a beach on the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Scrawled on the bottle were the words “Look inside” and folded inside was a badly faded note written as long ago as 1960.

“It was half buried in the sand and looking like it had been there since the beginning of time”, Mr Buffington told WMUR.

Once the faded pencil marks had been deciphered and the spelling mistakes corrected, Mr Buffington realised the note said: “Return to…at 419 Ocean Boulevard and receive a reward of $150 from Tina owner of Beachcomber”.

Now, five years after the discovery, he has returned the bottle to the family of the man who threw it into the sea five decades ago.

Mr Buffington tracked down Paula Pierce after days spent trawling through online listings and speaking to numerous local officials. Her parents, Paul and Tina, bought the Beachcomber Motel on Ocean Boulevard in the town of Hampton, New Hampshire in 1960.

The motel has since been sold and both Paul, who wrote the note, and his wife died more than 25 years ago.

But Mr Buffington was able to visit Ms Pierce in person in New Hampshire, having waited for several years in order to avoid the risk of the bottle getting lost in the post.

He told the Washington Post: “It was everything I hoped it would be and a lot more."

“What I hoped for going into that meeting, I think, is what I always hope for, which is to make a lifelong friend. And I think that’s exactly what happened.”

Ms Pierce said: “It just hit me that it was my father’s writing. I was shocked."

“This is very special because it brings back a piece of him, a piece of her, a piece of my childhood – all of the those things were very, very hard to lose.”

She insisted on giving Mr Buffington the $150 reward her father had promised the finder of the note decades earlier.

Mr Buffington is an experienced message-in-a-bottle hunter and runs the website messageinabottlehunter.com.

His quest to track down the sender of the note began with an online search that revealed numerous roads called Ocean Boulevard spread right across the United States.

He then tried linking the street with "Beachcomber", which led him to the state of New Hampshire - where the town of Hampton is home to a Beachcomber Motel.

Next, Mr Buffington called the local Chamber of Commerce and was passed from authority to authority before ending up speaking to a tax office, who told him how he could search property deeds for the area.

This led him to the names of Tina and Paul Pierce and, years later, to his fateful meeting with their daughter Paula.