Kevin Martinez has been a Navy sailor in Bremerton for the last decade. He has always been around the water, growing up in Puerto Rico and exploring the world on several trips with the Navy.

Martinez decided his next adventure on the water would be to launch a bottle with a message from the Port Townsend shores a couple of months ago.

“I didn’t think anybody was going to find it,” he said. “I thought of the odds of throwing stuff out to sea with how big the ocean is. I put my email in there on the off chance someone might find it.”

Even if nobody responded, Martinez was able to mark the experiment off his bucket list. “I always wanted to do it when I was little but my parents never bought me a bottle,” he said. “I was a boy with dreams in the back of my mind.”

Martinez’s message included his dream of doing this as a child. A part of the message read: “This simple message in a bottle is a boyhood dream sailing into reality…I dare to recapture a bit of my lost youth.”

About six weeks after releasing the bottle, Martinez received an email from a mother and son who found it at Lopez Beach, British Columbia. “I was incredulous,” Martinez said. “It was a beautiful message that made me nearly tear up. I can relate because I wanted to do it as a kid and for a kid to find it, it goes full circle.”

The mother, Cory, said: “This made my kids’ world, especially my son with autism who was the one who found it in his happy place here on the beach. Though this is my family home passed down through the years, we live in B.C. where this note and bottle will reside in my son’s room forever.”

Martinez, who believes his happy place has been the water his entire life, created a connection with someone he has yet to meet. “It’s like the universe connected us,” he said. “It was total fate that we were connected by the sea and one by the water. It is his happy place, and the water is a big part of my life.”

Marinez compares this new connection to many he has made in the Navy. “The Navy is all a mix of people who are all together by chance,” he said. “You don’t know where you will get transferred or who you will run across. The message compares because that connection was as random as it gets.”

Martinez has reached out since the original email but has yet to hear back. The family has not responded to an email from this newspaper either.

However, Martinez hopes to keep the connection alive and plans to send more bottles with messages through the sea in the future. “I don’t want people to think I am littering but I will throw them out to see what happens,” Martinez said.

The message in the bottle will be hanging in the boy’s room.