SYDNEY, N.S. -- A message in a bottle, sent more than 25 years ago, recently washed up on a Cape Breton shore, creating a relationship between two pen pals separated by decades and thousands of kilometres. 

It was a discovery eight-year-old Nyima Mitchell made while playing with friends near the water behind his house in Cheticamp, N.S. back in October.

“I thought it was just some bottle that washed up here, but then I saw it had the paper in it,” recalls Nyima.

It was a message in a bottle, dated August 1995, and signed by a girl from Quebec named Nellie Nadeau.

“It says, ‘Dear friend, me and my friends have decided to write someone,” reads Nyima.

Nellie wrote that she was vacationing in the Magdalen Islands that summer, and set the bottle afloat, simply hoping to find a pen pal.

“I thought, ‘wow, it looks like a teenager wrote this,’ recalls Britta Mitchell, Nyima’s mother. “So then we went to the computer and put her name in, and we found somebody.”

That ‘somebody’ was a family doctor in Alaska.

“The description on it, I think it was the hospital website, it said she grew up in Quebec and she was very outdoorsy, and I thought, ‘well, the age is right’,” recalls Mitchell.

Eventually the Mitchell’s were able to make contact with Nadeau online, and the Alaskan doctor confirmed that she had sent a message in a bottle from the Magdalen Islands as a teen, more than 25 years ago.

“She said it gave her the chills for a few days, like it was really something,” says Mitchell.

Although he wasn’t even born when the bottle was sent afloat, Nyima Mitchell decided he would become the woman’s pen pal, and wrote her a letter back.

“So now we’re waiting for her next letter. We still didn’t get it, but I think she’s working on it,” says Britta Mitchell.

The Mitchell’s say that despite today’s technology, they would like to stay in touch with their new pen pal through snail mail -- the way Nadeau intended a quarter century ago,.

“I think we both want to keep it that way,” says Britta Mitchell. “And she said she actually wants to come the next time she is in Eastern Canada and meet us, so that’s super exciting.”

A new connection, made the old fashioned way, at a time so many of us are apart.