Forty-five years late: how a message in a bottle found its way home

‘When you find this letter, you’ll know you have found a piece of treasure’ … sailor Tom Waugh’s message in a bottle to Martha was found by Luke Hamilton. Photograph: Luke Hamilton

“Darling Martha, miracle if you ever read this,” wrote a sailor named Tom Waugh in 1978, before tucking the letter into a scotch bottle, and throwing it overboard a container ship, 30 nautical miles north of Sydney.

“But it won’t be your first bottle letter, you have many more away out in the mid-Pacific.”