WHEN Alesha Johnson threw a plastic bottle into the sea off Lancashire last summer her mother expected it to wash back to shore, not travel to the other side of the world.

The bottle and the message inside it landed only a few feet in front of the four-year-old girl. But those few feet were the start of a 9,000-mile journey as tidal currents carried the bottle all the way from Morecambe Bay to the west coast of Australia. Nobody will know exactly how it got there but the most likely route would have been into the Atlantic, sweeping down the west coast of Africa and into the southern hemisphere. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope the bottle must have then crossed the Indian Ocean.

Six months after its epic voyage began, Alesha’s message washed up in a boatyard near Perth in Western Australia where it was spotted by a ten-year-old boy called Bob. Alesha’s mother Sonia Matthews, 27, of Heysham, Lancashire, said that she was more amazed than her daughter by the bottle’s reappearance.

“I don’t think Alesha really understands it all. She’s only 4. But I never stop going on about it to people.

“It was summertime when we threw it in the sea. All the children in class were given bottles to take home in July but Alesha’s is the only one that got a reply,” she said.

“I don’t know what the other parents did with theirs. We went straight down to Morecambe Bay. Alesha was only 3 at the time. She could barely throw the cola bottle beyond her feet. I just assumed it would be washed straight back and forgot all about it.

“Then recently when I went to pick her up from nursery I was told that she had had a reply from this little boy and it had made it all the way to Australia. I couldn’t believe it. I was walking on air for about four days and was really proud. It’s made me very happy.” Ms Matthews said that Bob had made a copy of Alesha’s original note and returned it to the Time For Nursery in Heysham. He also wrote to Alesha and the family is now looking forward to learning more about him.

Ms Matthews added: “Bob wrote a letter to the nursery saying that he had found it. He wrote: ‘It’s travelled a long way. My dad had to look on the internet to find out where Morecambe is. We are in the middle of moving house and it’s Christmas here but when we are settled I’ll write to you again’. ”

Penny Holliday of the National Institute of Oceanography in Southampton described the bottle’s journey as astonishing.

She said: “I have never heard of a message in a bottle travelling so far so quickly.”

Last December a message in a bottle sent from New York was washed up at Newquay, Cornwall. It had been sent 18 months earlier.

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