Do you know an Aoife who tossed a message in a bottle into the sea four years ago? 

Since then, it has crossed the Atlantic and washed up on a beach in New Jersey.

The bottle was picked up by Frank Bolger and his wife - who like to go litter picking when they visit the seaside.

“We go to the beach almost every weekend,” he told Moncrieff.

“We were down for a week last week and when we got to the beach, we set our chairs up, set our blankets out and then we went for a walk.

“We started picking up trash on our walk, turned away back to our blanket.

“My wife noticed a clump of seaweed and said, ‘Oh, it’s a bottle.’

“We opened up the bag to throw it out and she said, ‘No, there’s something in it.’”

At first they tried opening it with their hands but the bottle was impossible to get into.

Only when they returned to their home and got out some tools did they manage to retrieve Aoife’s note.

“It was very legible,” he said.

“It had just been folded up very tight, so there were a lot of creases and some grips in it.

“Otherwise it was in good shape.”

The note is dated 17th July 2019 and reads as follows, “Greetings from Ireland. I have thrown this bottle into the sea for someone to find another day.

"Maybe it's travelled down to Africa or to Iceland. I won't know if someone found this, but I hope it's found. Aoife."

The couple are keen to get in touch with Aoife and asked a local journalist to help.

“I didn’t even know how to say the name but there’s a girl in Wildwood, she publishes the Wildwood By The Sea magazine,” Mr Bolger said.

“When we showed it to her, she’s the one who posted it and it went viral from her post.

“[In] Wildwood, we have a heavy Irish American population, so when all those people saw it, they started sharing it in Ireland and it just seemed like it took off.

“Everybody wanted to find her.”

If anyone knows Aoife, Mr Bolger said the best way to get in touch with him is through the Wildwood By The Sea Facebook page.

Main image: Aoife's letter.