KEY POINTS:
It took rock star Sting a year to get a response when he sent out his Message in a Bottle in the song by The Police.
But two years and four months is how long it has taken for a message in a bottle cast adrift off Australia
to be washed up on a Whangarei beach, much to the delight of Tutukaka Coast youngster Matt Wakelin.
Eleven-year-old Matt and his mum Esther Eves were walking along the beach at Wharewa Bay, between Ngunguru Sandspit and the Horahora River, on Sunday when they spotted a bottle in the sand.
"Mum rolled her foot over it and said 'Oh, there's a message in a bottle' and it was," he says.
It was difficult getting the well-sealed cork out of the bottle, but the excited youngster soon realised the bottle had been sent from Australia.
The accompanying letter said it had been cast adrift by Kevin Ross, a self-confessed message-in-a-bottle nut, who claims to have the world record for returns from bottles he has sent into the ocean.
Mr Ross, from Brisbane, said he had put the bottle into the ocean on August 8, 2005, from latitude 39.01 degrees and longitude 144.15 degrees.
Matt put the co-ordinates into Google Earth and discovered that it must have been thrown overboard near King Island in the Bass Strait, which separates Tasmania from the south of the Australian mainland.
He also checked out the ocean currents and worked out that it had probably travelled more than 1800km, passing through Bass Strait, up the east coast of Australia, through the Coral Sea, across the Pacific Ocean, down Northland's east cast, past the Poor Knights and into Wharewa Bay.
After learning so much about where the bottle came from, and its journey here, Matt now intends to write to Mr Ross to let him know another of his bottles has been located.
"I was pretty excited to find it and I thought it would have just come from somewhere else in New Zealand. It's amazing that it came that far," he said.
Matt said people he has told about his find so far reckoned that he had more chance of winning Lotto, so he's hoping his mum will now win the big $10 million Lotto prize this weekend.
- NORTHERN ADVOCATE
