The message in a bottle traveled from Ireland to the Jersey shore, and the author of the note has now been identified

Finding a message in a bottle might seem like something only found in movies or picture books, but for a couple who recently took a stroll along a North Wildwood beach, it was reality. On Friday, the mystery behind their discovery was solved when the person across the Atlantic who wrote the note turned out to be Aoife Byrne.

Karen and Frank Bolger, of Bellmawr, Camden County, were walking with their granddaughter on 14th Street Beach picking up trash last week when they happened upon the small bottle, which was signed only with the name “Aoife” and dated July Note included 17th 2019.

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“Greetings from Ireland,” the message begins, “I threw this bottle into the sea for someone else to find. Maybe she went to Africa or to Iceland. I don’t know if anyone found it, but I hope so. It’s been found.”

The random story was shared from Facebook account on Sunday from The Wildwood Sun by the Sea Magazine. The post received more than 1,500 likes and was shared hundreds of times by users. Several news media outlets in the Philadelphia area and Ireland reported the discovery of the Bolgers, on TV And on-linewhich also helped with the search.

Byrne lives in Bray, Ireland, a coastal town on the Irish Sea less than 15 miles south of Dublin in County Wicklow.

Her father Martin was the first to associate the message in a bottle with his aoife after seeing the story on his aoife local television news. He called out to his daughter in the next room and together they excitedly emailed the Bolgers.

Aoife and Martin eventually spoke to the Bolgers and said they could hear the “sheer joy in their voices” over the phone. To prove her identity as the author of the notes, Byrne scribbled a message on a piece of paper, showing that her handwriting matched that on the paper the Bolgers found.

Byrne described being on the east coast of Ireland in 2019 when she found the bottle she was using on the beach. “I’m a songwriter so I had my notebook with me that day and I found this little bottle and I knew I had to put a message in it. And I threw her right in the middle of the sea,” Byrne said Irish News on Friday. “I didn’t expect it to come to America, I figured it would end up down south or down north.”

There’s no telling exactly how the tiny bottle and crumpled note survived the more than 3,200-mile journey to North Wildwood – but the Irish people involved must have had at least a little luck.