I wrote the following message for our first genuine message in a bottle, which we sealed in a Route Beer bottle and threw off the Santa Monica pier into the Pacific:

Dear Person, a few years ago when I was walking on a beach in Scotland, I found a message in a bottle, written by two little girls. It was accompanied by some sticky jelly babies and it read: 'Dear Person, We are trapped on an island. We are very poor. We have a boat, thank you' and then their names and addresses. I took the message with me to the Gulf of Mexico a few weeks later and wrote back to the girls from there, pretending that I had found the bottle on the other side of the Atlantic. I thought this would be quite exciting for the girls. They wrote back and said that school was boring and next time to send a picture.