HAMPTON, N.H. -- A message in a bottle sent out to sea more than five decades ago was found 1,500 miles away and returned to a family in New Hampshire.
The long-lost message was discovered by Clint Buffington, a man vacationing in the Turks and Caicos. He knew there was something about that bottle.
"(I found) this Coke bottle half buried in the sand, looked like it had been there since the beginning of time. On the paper, there was something written in pencil, like handwriting, it said, 'Look inside.'"
Clint Buffington, a musician and writing teacher from Utah, broke open the bottle and unrolled that waterlogged note.
"I could read words like 'return' and 'Beachcomber,'" he said.
He used those soggy words to search for the sender and the story.
Turns out it was written by Paula Pierce's father, probably more than 50 years ago.
Her father and mother bought the Beachcomber Motel in Hampton in 1960. Her father wrote a joke and cast it into the Atlantic saying, "Return to 419 Ocean Boulevard and receive a reward of $150 from Tina, owner of the Beachcomber."
Paula's parents are both gone now. The Beachcomber sold a couple years ago.
"This is special because it brings back a piece of him, a piece of her, a piece of my childhood, a piece of the Beachcomber," Paula Pierce said. "All of these things are very hard to lose."
She insisted on living up to her father's promise by giving Clint that reward. But the biggest reward is the message in a bottle finding its way back home
"The significance of the message in the bottle was not lost on him. It took him to find it, and it took him to come across the country and bring it to me," Pierce said.