On the afternoon of June 27, Doug Kass and his eight-year-old daughter Amelia, of Raleigh, N.C., were out for a walk on the south shore in Edgartown, making their way toward the beach in thick fog. The father and daughter stumbled on a family of skunks, forcing them to turn tail and find a new route. Once on the beach, still surrounded by fog but safe from the skunks, Mr. Kass and Amelia found a wine bottle that had washed ashore.

Inside was a message. As Mr. Kass uncorked the bottle he found a single sheet of yellow legal pad paper covered in a tight, neat script. It contained the tale of a broken heart. “Time slowed, then stopped, and you were gone . . . I went back to the places we used to know, looking for you among great stacks of books of anonymous heartbreak, but the authors were all renamed,” wrote Andrea Lindsay wrote in her “apology to the sea.” The bottle had been thrown from the shore on Nantucket on June 24 according to the message.

“You read about these things and don’t expect them to happen,” said Mr. Kass. “I thought it was really well-written, actually,” he said in a phone conversation with the Gazette later. “It’s obviously someone who’s younger,” he laughed. “In time these things pass.”

In her message, Ms. Lindsay asks that whoever finds the bottle write to her. “This is my parent’s mailbox — my plans for the following year are as unsure as the journey of this bottle,” she wrote.

Mr. Kass, who teaches communications and film at Elon University, said he intends to write back. “I’m going to extend the oceanic metaphor, given that it was a message in a bottle and tell her that there is more than one fish in the sea,” he said. “If you have a fish and you let it go and it doesn’t swim back to you, you probably never really had that fish in the first place. If it swims back to you, then you know it was meant to be.”

He said following the experience his daughter became taken with the idea of sending her own message in a bottle.

Could this experience find its way into one of his lectures? “It’s probably not the most efficient form of mass communication,” he said.

— Nina Tarnawsky