Man finds Bay Area resident who launched message in bottle

Clint Buffington said he found the message in a bottle written ten years ago by then-Bay Area teen Tom Welch. (Clint Buffington)

SALT LAKE CITY - After a search, a Utah man has connected with a Bay Area resident who sent off a message in a bottle into the Atlantic a decade ago as a teenage boy.

Musician and beach-comber Clint Buffington said the bottle was discovered on the sandy shores of a remote island in the British West Indies near the Bahamas.

On Tuesday, KTVU shared his story. It didn't take long before Buffington and the author of that bottled message, Tom Welch, were connected.

The connection was made with the help of Menlo School in Atherton, where Welch attended high school.

In an email with KTVU and the school's director of communications, Shayne Olson, Welch exclaimed his excitement when he heard the news that his message had been retrieved.

What they're saying:

"Holy moly, I did send this message in a bottle while sailing across the Atlantic Ocean! What a crazy set of circumstances that over 10 years of circling around the ocean it stayed air tight and landed on a beach and was found by a message in a bottle hunter! I am truly shocked and serendipitous that it was found," Welch shared.

The bottle was discovered on a beach of a remote island in the British West Indies, near the Bahamas, according to Clint Buffington. (Clint Buffington)

The backstory:

Buffington said that he came upon the bottle back in February. He quickly noticed the well-preserved condition it was in and speculated that the bottle circled the North Atlantic at least two times before its discovery.

"I was immediately struck by this bottle--the whole thing, including the message inside, was in such incredibly good shape, I thought it couldn't be more than a few weeks or months old," Buffington shared with KTVU in an email. "Usually, when a message in a bottle looks this good, we call it ‘young,’ as in, ‘no way has that been floating around very long,’" he added.

But Buffington would later learn that this speculation was wrong.

He said he and his family finally opened the bottle last week, after they found a time to gather together for the occasion.

"Because finding messages in bottles is such a ‘family affair’ for us, we often like to open them when we get together--a strange tradition, I know! But we are all normal, busy adults with families and careers and responsibilities, so it's often the case that our vacation time together gives us a chance to finally slow down and open these things," Buffington explained.

So when he and his brother finally unveiled the content of the glass time capsule, he said, "I was stunned to see that it was 10 years old!"

Message intact

Buffington said what was surprising was how the message inside was still rolled up tightly with the rubber band holding it in place still intact.

"I've never seen a rubber band last more than a few years in a bottled message -- they typically melt or dry out and crumble. The other thing they do is that they ‘rip’ the center out of the message," he explained. "Once that happens, vital bits of the message start to wear away, lost forever."

But this scroll was undamaged and the message easy to read, with the writing "crystal clear," Buffington noted.

He said he launched an initial search for Welch, who would be about 27 now, but that the young man didn't seem to have much of a social media presence.

What he learned from Welch's LinkedIn page was that he had attended Stanford University.

Welch's profile also noted that he's working as a controls engineer at Menlo Park-based Mainspring Energy.

What the teen's message said

The letter penned by the then-teenage Welch read: "Hello! This message was released from the middle of the mid atlantic ridge on a sailboat crossing from the Canary Islands to Saint Martin on the 66 catamaran FLASH. We are halfway done with our very long journey. If you get this message, please contact us at: Tom.welch@menloschool.org and let us know where the bottle landed, your name, and something about you.

"My name is Tom Welch. I am 17 years old. I live in Menlo Park, California. Our crew consists of 8 people and we have been sailing for 7 days so far. Hope you get this message."

KTVU reached out to Menlo School to confirm that Welch was a student there and to see if officials had any information about him.

Olson in turn, reached out to Welch.

Connection made

By Tuesday night, the bottle sender and the bottle discoverer had made contact and already emailed back and forth.

In a message to both KTVU and Olson, Buffington wrote, "I can't tell you how happy I am to have this message ‘solved’ after all, when it was beginning to look a bit daunting... I don't know that it could have worked without your help, so thank you."

Searching for "sea mail"

Buffington said this hobby of locating bottled messages all began with his father.

"He was the first to find a message in a bottle in our family back in 2006, and that lit a fire for me!" Buffington shared.

He said the following year, he came upon his own first discovery, and the beachcombing activity would grow to become a shared adventure with his family and an opportunity to spend time and bond.

"Over 130 messages in bottles later and here we are!" the treasure hunter shared.

As a kid, there was something magical about the idea of finding a message from the past.

"I grew up in the country, far from friends and from town. The idea of a penpal appealed to me from a very young age, and somewhere along the way I learned about messages in bottles, though I don't recall knowing if they were real," Buffington explained. "So when I actually began finding them, it was like a childhood dream come true. How could I possibly stop?!"

Big picture view:

Buffington said over the years, the messages have resulted in gifts both to him and to those who have been recipients of a treasured relic from the past.

"I'll never forget the first time I returned a message to a woman, written decades ago by her deceased father. In that moment I understood that this was something more like a calling than a ‘hobby,’ that finding messages in bottles could really matter to people, could give them back a cherished, sorely missed piece of their past--a final chance to hear from lost loved ones," Buffington explained.

He went on to share that the woman, named Paula Pierce, couldn't have dreamed of hearing from her late father again.

"I felt so deeply honored and humbled to give her one last little note from him, however brief," Buffington shared. "It feels like the closest thing to magic I am ever likely to experience in real life."

He said Pierce wasn’t the last person to whom he'd delivered a message from a deceased loved one.

He also said he remained in contact with her over the years, as he has with others whom he’s met through discovered messages.

"Even among the living, the sense of reconnecting with a specific moment in the past can be extremely powerful," Buffington said, as he recalled meeting a couple who had launched their message to mark their first wedding anniversary, Valentine’s Day in 1999.

Buffington would find their bottle about eight years later. The bond that grew between him and the couple resulted in a close friendship, and the pair would even be there when he married his wife, Kate.

"Carol and Ed, whose message in a bottle celebrated love and came from their love for each other, attended our wedding," Buffington explained.

Messages through music

A scroll through Buffington’s social media pages shows him and his brother engaged in their bottled message-finding endeavors, and it also shows his work in another passion: his music.

Buffington said the two passions intersect in a powerful way that allows him to be a storyteller.

"Songs often feel urgent and necessary, they capture an intense and important moment or period for the characters involved," he said. "Well, that's the same with messages in bottles. People don't send them for no reason."

He said, more often than not, there is a motivation behind these bottled messages being sent out into the world.

"The celebration of love, the yearning for love, the lamenting of lost love, or the mourning of lost loved ones," he noted.

Other times, it’s a simple recognition that a person is experiencing a special adventure or an important life moment.

"Or, sometimes people are doing something really interesting or surprising or noteworthy," he said, "like in Tom Welch's case, crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat at age 17."