Three years after the ship from which it was dropped arrived in Bermuda, a message in a bottle finally found local shores.

A local fisherman found the bottle on a South Shore beach on Wednesday.

The water-damaged message inside said it had been dropped in the sea from a school ship ? the schooner ? as the ship sailed from Key West, Florida to Bermuda.

?We are conducting a drift bottle experiment,? the message said.

It also said the bottle ?was dropped on April 4, 2001, at the latitude of 30 degrees, 25 minutes?, around 1,000 nautical miles from Bermuda.

The message was in the sea for so long that the contact phone number at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts has since been changed.

And the has been sold to another sea school in New York while the former captain of the ship, Capt. Sean Bercaw, no longer works for the company.

The Sea Education Association said this week they did not even know what the drift bottle experiment was.

?Maybe some of the students dropped it on a whim,? a spokesperson said.

Fisherman Monte Ible told he saw the bottle washed up at Astwood Cove at 7.20 a.m. on Wednesday when he ?was looking for buoys and floats that might have drifted in?.

This is the second time that Mr. Ible has found a bottle from the sea with a message inside.

?I found one 14 years ago. I was coming in off the sea from a fishing trip when I found a bottle floating in the water,? he said.

The bottle came from Nova Scotia, Canada, where Mr. Ible happened to be flying a few days after he found it.

?I took the bottle back,? he said. ?They were happy someone found it.

?They say lightning does not strike in the same place twice, but that is not necessarily true.?