“Nothing that’s worthwhile is ever easy. Remember that.” – Nicholas Sparks

The world’s oldest known message in a bottle was thrown off a German ship on June 12, 1886, and now has been found by an Australian family on a remote beach in the country after their car got stuck in the sand.

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On January 21, Tonya Illman was walking along the beach and found a vintage bottle and she decided to take it home for her bookshelf. Later, someone noticed that there was a note inside the bottle.

As per a video uploaded by Tonya’s husband Kym Illman on YouTube, the message written in German on a piece of paper, bound and tied with a string, was kept in a 19th-century Dutch gin bottle. It was thrown off the sailing barque Paula, about 600 miles off the coast of Western Australia.

At the time, German ships were conducting a 69-year experiment that involved throwing thousands of bottles into the sea to track ocean currents. Each message was marked with the ship’s coordinates, the date, and the name of the ship, says the video.

The Western Australian Museum confirmed the message’s legitimacy, making it the oldest message in a bottle ever found breaking the previous record of 108 years. The Illman family has since loaned the note and bottle to the museum.

Here’s the video: