After almost 200 days at sea, a message in a bottle was discovered on Elbow Beach around 1,000 miles from where it was thrown into the ocean by a student.

Graham Smith, who discovered the bottle yesterday, said yesterday: “I have seen many a bottle float up on the beach, but I never found a message in one before.”

Mr Smith said that early yesterday morning he was enjoying a walk along the beach with a neighbour when he happened to notice what appeared to be a wine bottle.

“It looked like it had a straw in it,” he said. “When I looked closer, I realised that it was a little too wide for a straw and it appeared to be a piece of paper.

“It looks like it was a wine bottle, but the label had washed off. It had a couple of small barnacles. I tried to get it open, but the cork broke so I took it home and used a corkscrew.”

The message inside, written by Nicole Reasonda of Upton, Massachusetts, said that she threw the bottle in the water on March 26 while on board the school sailing vessel Corwith Cramer.

She wrote that the ship and it’s crew were en route to a science deployment in the Sargasso Sea, giving her coordinates and urging whoever found the note to contact her.

Mr Smith said in an unusual coincidence, his cousin Dr Robbie Smith, who works at the Bermuda Aquarium Museum and Zoo, had been on the same vessel between April 20 and May 30 — less than a month after Ms Reasonda’s letter was written.

“A colleague of mine worked out that it came about 1,000 miles in about 195 days,” he said. “I’ve sent Ms Reasonda an e-mail, and I sent the bottle to BIOS for the people there who are studying the currents.”