From Florida to Ireland_2
© Jim McMahonThe bottle traveled northeast along the Gulf Stream from Florida to Ireland.
Last week, 17-year-old Adam Flannery was walking along a pebble beach on Ireland's west coast when he saw a rubber-corked bottle with a note inside.

The message explained that the bottle was part of an experiment. It contained directions for anyone who found the bottle to contact Ethan Hall at Melbourne High School in Melbourne, Florida.

Adam and his father did as the message in the bottle asked and contacted Hall, a marine-science teacher.

Hall told Florida Today that he used to joke with students that their bottle might find them an Irish pen pal if they were lucky. But none of his students' bottles had ever traveled to another country in all the years he had been using the experiment.

The bottle was placed in the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Canaveral, Florida. In 16 months, it floated at least 3,720 miles along the Gulf Stream, a powerful ocean current that pushes northeast from the East Coast of the United States all the way to Europe.

Corey Swearingen, now 18, set the bottle afloat in April 2009 when he was in Hall's class. He was amazed to find out his bottle traveled all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. "I learned that the Gulf Stream goes really, really far away," Swearingen told reporters.

From Florida to Ireland_1
© Jim McMahonCorey Swearingen's note spent 16 months bottled in the ocean.
Finding the bottle stoked the Flannerys' curiosity about the way ocean currents work. Both father and son now plan to learn more about marine science.

The bottle and its message are now on display in a pub up the beach from where the bottle was found in Kilbaha, Ireland. Swearingen says he has always wanted to visit Europe, and when he does, he may stop by to see just how far his message-in-a-bottle traveled.