(Oct. 5) -- There's e-mail, there's snail mail -- and now there's sail mail.
A father and son in Ireland discovered a bottle containing a message written by a Florida high school student that traveled some 3,720 miles after being tossed into the Atlantic Ocean more than a year ago.
The remarkable journey of the message in a bottle began in the classroom of Melbourne, Fla., marine science teacher Ethan Hall, who every year demonstrates the flow of the Gulf Stream by having his students cast bottles into the sea.
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In past years, the bottles have followed the current as far north as Rhode Island, but one bottle containing a note written by student Corey Swearingen drifted all the way to Ireland.
"I would tease the students that maybe you'll find a nice Irish pen pal or Moroccan date to the prom, but it hadn't happened in four years. So this certainly has been exciting," Hall told Florida Today.
Swearingen's message, as well as those written by his classmates, were dumped from a charter fishing boat into the Gulf Stream about 20 miles off Port Canaveral, Fla., on April 22, 2009.
Over the next 16 months, the green glass bottle -- which contained a message explaining the science experiment and urging anyone who might find it to contact Hall -- drifted across the Atlantic before washing up on the shore outside Keating's Pub in Kilbaha, a tiny fishing village in County Clare, Ireland.
That's where 17-year-old Adam Flannery and his father, Stephen, discovered the corked bottle.
"Our reaction on finding the bottle was one of surprise to find it intact, as the beach it was washed up on is a pebble beach," Stephen Flannery told the press in an e-mail. "Then excitement of seeing the message inside with the bottle number '08-116' clearly visible."
Flannery wasn't the only person excited by the discovery.
Swearingen, who has since graduated high school and now attends Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Fla., told CNN he was "excited and amazed" that his bottle had been found.
The 18-year-old also said he learned something from the experiment.
"I learned that the Gulf Stream goes really, really far away."