A 13-year-old girl in New York City was overjoyed, in 2015, after a message in a bottle she cast out into the sea two years before was found off the coast of Ireland.

This summer, on July 13, Rory Golden of Flagship Scuba, a diving school based in Dublin, was on his way back to shore from a very special annual dive when he noticed a barnacle-encrusted bottle floating in the water.

Golden dives each year off the coast of Galway’s Friar Island to visit a bottle of ashes he placed there 7 years ago, helping to fulfill the final wishes of his friend – famous Titanic explorer and adventurer Ralph White.

He spotted the bottle less than half a mile out to sea, drifting between the end of the Aughris Pennisula, Claddaghduff, Connemara, and Friar Island. He quickly recovered it and then opened the bottle later that evening to find a sweet and to-the-point message from Natalie Schnitzer of New York City, dated August 25, 2013.

Look what Rory found today drifting off Friar Island, Connemara. This bottle was thrown into the sea at Nantucket in...

Posted by Flagship Scuba on Monday, July 13, 2015

“My name is Natalie. I’m throwing this bottle into the ocean at Quidnet Beach on the island of Nantucket on August 25, 2013,” it read.

“If you find this, please write to me and tell me you found my 2013 message in a bottle.”

Golden posted photos of the bottle and the site where it was found to Flagship Scuba’s Facebook page, where it soon caught the attention of Natalie’s father, Alan.

As Alan explained, his family has an end of summer tradition of sending out a message in a bottle from Nantucket Island in Massachusetts.

“Over the years we've received a few notes from people who have found our bottles, but none from as far away as Ireland!” he wrote.

The bottle made a journey of 3,000 miles and will be returned to Natalie later this year.

* Originally published in September 2015.