When 11-year-old John Weatherly wrote a message, stuffed it in a bottle and threw it overboard off the cruise ship Lurline, little did he realize that four decades later, a girl would find it and set off on a four-month journey of her own.

Only her journey would be a modern-day Internet search for Weatherly and his family.

Riley Astrup, 9, was walking the beach in February at Marine Corps Base Hawai'i at Kane'ohe Bay when she spotted an old Coca-Cola bottle lying on some rocks. She and her mother, Sandra, could see that it contained a note.

They had to break the bottle to retrieve the note, which was written on stationery from the Matson Line cruise ship.

The ship took the Weatherly family from O'ahu to the Mainland. Weatherly's father was a colonel in the Army and had been stationed at Fort Shafter from 1963 to 1967, years Weatherly would later describe as "some of my best memories."

That the bottle had floated in the ocean for 40 years came as no surprise to Doug Luther, a professor of Oceanography at the University of Hawai'i. He said the old Coke bottles were very strong, which is why it survived its journey. Luther said the bottle probably traveled toward Mexico, then past Hawai'i, toward the Marshall Islands, the Philippines and Japan, before coming ashore on the O'ahu beach.

"Theoretically, it could have been found in Canada," Luther said. "Storm winds combined with currents most likely made it land."

Its landing led to a challenge for the Astrup family: They wanted to find the Weatherlys, but the note provided them with only the first initials of the message-writer's father's name — A.C. Weatherly — and that the family had transferred to Fort Sill, Okla.

The note also said young John's father was a colonel and was attached to the artillery division. For three months, Sandra Astrup Googled names, researched online Web sites and sent e-mails to people with the same last name. Her searches came up empty.

"Do you have any idea how many John Weatherlys there are?" she said. "It was a needle in a haystack."

Astrup gave up her search for a while, but after the shooting deaths at Virginia Tech last month, she decided she was in need of some good news. So she picked up the online search and this time, her efforts paid off. Her Google searches yielded an artillery photograph from the 1940s with the name Abbott Weatherly, then a captain.

After finding someone with that name in North Carolina, Astrup's husband, a chief warrant officer four in the Army, phoned and left a message. The Astrups were thrilled when the senior Weatherly, 91, promptly returned the call.

Sandra told Weatherly about how her daughter had found the message written by his son and how they had been searching for the message writer. Weatherly promptly called his son, John, who lives across the street.

"My father called and asked me if I remembered throwing a bottle off the Lurline," said John Weatherly, now 51 and a grandfather. Laughing, he said, "I thought I was in trouble."

John Weatherly recalled that he had decided to write the message and toss it overboard when the captain of the cruise ship made an announcement that the ship was at the halfway point to the Mainland.

"The chances of finding it were so slim, it never entered my mind," Weatherly said. And he never told his father what he had done.

Riley Astrup and John Weatherly have exchanged e-mails about the experience, which brought two "Army brats" together.

"He said I was his little mermaid," Riley said. "He said he's a kid at heart and finding the bottle brought out the kid again."

The families have shared bits of their military experiences. For example, the Astrups learned that Abbott Weatherly retired in 1969 and was with the artillery division that landed on Omaha Beach five days after the D-Day invasion in 1944. He also made the march into Berlin, happening upon the Auschwitz concentration camp along the way.

"He's a real hero," Sandra Astrup said. "There is something about that old note that makes us feel like we have known them for all those years."

Another touch of charm tied to the note is that both the Weatherlys and "Message in a Bottle" author Nicholas Spark live in New Bern, N.C. The story became a 1999 movie starring Kevin Costner.

"He may have written the book, but we lived it," Abbott Weatherly said.

Lisa McLean is a freelance writer living in Hawai'i. Her husband is an active-duty Navy officer.