Cast away, found again: The senders' story
'It's so crazy, because I didn't think this would matter to too many people, but everyone's very impacted by it,' Hawaii Kai resident Payton Hollenbeck said.
Hollenbeck, now 21, never expected the miniature bottle, corked tight, with tiny perfectly folded origami cranes and a message scribbled by her then 6-year-old brother Elias, tossed into the ocean off Kaena Point in 2018, would ever be found.
But it was. After seven years adrift, the bottle washed ashore at Cortez Beach, Florida. Scooped from the sand with wide-eyed wonder by 11-year-old Josie Law, visiting from Michigan.
'I was just walking and I was looking for sand dollars, shells and shark teeth. Then I came across this bottle, and I thought it was just a piece of trash. I picked it up and I saw that it was a note and a bottle, so I ran to my mom and I showed her it,' Josie said.
Josie then texted her new mystery pen pal.
'I was at home with both my friends and then I just got like a random number messaging me,' Hollenbeck said. 'And then I like opened it and I was like, 'What in the world!' She didn't, even tell me where she was from originally. So I thought it was somewhere on Oahu, and then when she said Florida, I was shocked. But I don't even believe it at first, like most people, but like I'm like, there's no other way it could have happened.'
The modern-day marine tale causing an unexpected wave of attention for Hollenbeck and her ohana.
'I get a lot of random phone calls. Asking if it's true, and asking if we wrote the stuff on it, and we did, so I can't say anything about that,' she added. 'I don't know how it happened. I don't I don't know much about the currents or anything so it's hard to imagine how it did happen but yeah, it was really shocking.'
Hollenbeck said she and her brother got the idea after they found a message in a bottle along Paiko Beach in Maunalua Bay.
'We were just walking, and we saw it,' she explained. 'So then we decided to make our own.'
The siblings never expecting the tiny time capsule to create such a stir.
'I'm just glad it's a story that can bring positivity,' Hollenbeck said.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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