Mr Gilmore threw the letter overboard when he was over 1,000 kilometres east of Fremantle, WA.

Last week, 9-year-old Jyah Elliott found a message in a bottle on a South Australia beach. The letter inside was written by Paul Gilmore, then 13, in 1969. And now it's not just the letter that's been found, but Gilmore himself.

© Carla Elliott
Jyah Elliott, 9, holds the letter he found as well as the smashed bottle that held it.

Gilmore wrote the letter on November 17, 1969. The
brief missive said, "My name is Paul Gilmore. I am thirteen (13) years
old. I am from England, and I am travelling to Melbourne, Australia. The
ship is the TV Fairstar, Sitmar Line. We are 1,000 miles east of
Fremantle, Western Aus."

"Please reply," closed the letter, along with Gilmore's new address.

Fifty
years later, Jyah Elliott found Gilmore's message while fishing with
his dad, Paul Elliott, at Talia Beach in South Australia's Eyre
Peninsula. 

"Jyah
wanted to open it, and so he opened it and tried to get it out, but it
was a bit damp ... I couldn't get it in my fingers, so we had to break
it," Paul told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

"He was so excited, he said he found a message in a bottle from 1869," Carla Elliot, Jyah's mother, told the ABC.

"I said, '1869? Are you sure about that?' He goes 'oh no, 1969.'"

Jyah
wrote a reply to the letter, which he sent to the address provided.
Though realizing that in the past 50 years, Gilmore had likely moved,
the Elliott family also turned to Facebook.

Soon after the news
broke, the ABC was able to track down Paul Gilmore — mostly. As it turns
out, Gilmore hasn't yet heard from Jyah Elliott because he's on a
cruise in the Baltic.

"It's amazing, absolutely incredible," Gilmore's sister Annie Crossland said to the ABC. "He'll be chuffed to bits."

Crossland
said that the Gilmores moved to Melbourne in 1969, but moved back home
to England in 1973. She remembers Gilmore writing a number of letters
along the way. 

"He sent about six of them, so it's good that one of them has surfaced," Crossland said.

"I
don't remember where he got the bottles from ... I remember my
dad saying it cost him a fortune in drinks on the ship," she added.

Experts
believe that the bottle didn't spend 50 years bobbing around the ocean.
Instead, it was likely buried in the sand, and then resurfaced during a
storm. 

"If it had been dropped in anywhere in the ocean
somewhere south of Australia, then there's no way it's going to stay
actually at sea moving around for more than a year or two," David
Griffin, an oceanographer with the Australian government, told The Mirror.

Though
Paul Gilmore may not yet know about Jyah's letter waiting for him,
Gilmore's sister says he'll reply as soon as he returns from the Baltic
Sea.

Read the full article