Luke Hamilton is no stranger to finding messages in bottles — he's found two already in the past month. But his latest find was particularly intriguing.
The message, enclosed in a scotch bottle and sealed with a cork and a screw-top, was written on packing slips from the cargo ship that it was tossed from and tightly wrapped in the pages of an old women's magazine.
It was 45 years old and in immaculate condition.
"It was so interesting, each little detail as we unwrapped each layer and found more information," Mr Hamilton said.
The bottle was launched into the sea 30 nautical miles north of Sydney in 1978, the year Mr Hamilton was born.
He believes it had been long-buried in the beach dunes near where he found it at Wallaga Lake, on the NSW far south coast, and unearthed by recent big ocean swells.
There were two letters inside the bottle written aboard the container ship ACT 6 by a sailor named Tom.
One letter was addressed to the bottle's finder, and one to a 12-year-old girl called Martha Brister.
The note said:
"Darling Martha, miracle if you ever read this. But it won't be your first bottle letter. You have many more away out in the mid-Pacific."
Mr Hamilton gave his father-in-law, a retired merchant seaman, the task of tracking Ms Brister down.
He promptly accomplished the task and called her to confirm he had the right person.
Ms Brister — also known by her married name Cave — is now 57 and works as a horse trainer at Warwick Farm Racecourse in Sydney.
She first met Tom Waugh when she was 7 or 8 years old and living in England.
Mr Waugh was a sailor from New Zealand and would stay a few doors up from her family whenever he was on shore leave.
"I'd wander up the road and he'd sit there and show me how to tie knots and tell interesting tales of the sea," Ms Brister said.
After her family emigrated to Australia in 1976, Mr Waugh started dropping messages for her as he crossed the oceans on cargo ships.
"At that age, to have someone go out of their way to do something like that for you that was so special," Ms Brister said.
She remembers five or six letters being returned to her, found in far flung locations around the world.
The people who found and returned the messages often included their own letters to Ms Brister.
"I got some from some South America, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands," she said.
"They were really exciting to get at the time, I was only a kid.
"But this is the first message in about 43 years."
Second message in a bottle found in a month
As a Landcare coastal weeds project officer, Mr Hamilton spends a lot of time scouring remote beaches on the far south coast.
Three weeks before he found the letter to Ms Brister he found another message in a bottle in the Nadgee Nature Reserve.
The message was a four-page ship's log from the tall ship Soren Larson, dropped in Bass Strait on its way back from the Australian Wooden Boat Festival in Tasmania.
While it was another fascinating find, it had only been at sea for two months before it was found.
For Martha Brister, Mr Hamilton's latest find was a "blast from the past".
And to deepen the intrigue, a subsequent Facebook search revealed that Ms Brister and Mr Hamilton have a mutual friend in Tathra.
She remembers Mr Waugh as an "old man" at the time they met, and he retired from his seafaring career not long after.
She later heard that he had passed away.
For the message from her old friend to be unearthed so many decades later feels almost like finding hidden treasure.
"It is a miracle, I think," Ms Brister said, echoing the words penned by Mr Waugh so many years ago.
