WENATCHEE -- It was as if Vickie Stanton walked into a chapter of a mysterious adventure book. What were the chances of finding that barnacle-covered bottle on the sand at Long Beach peninsula's Leadbetter Point State Park?

"Wow, there's a note in it," the Entiat woman recalls saying to her husband, Chuck, when she picked up the bottle March 30. She brought the bottle back to the trailer the family keeps on vacation property they own near Ocean Park. She used a corkscrew to pull the tight stopper. She extracted a plastic bag containing three sheets of paper curled around a dollar bill.

The note was damp, faded and fragile as she unrolled it and laid it out to dry.

One sheet was dated May 28, 1994. The note explained how the bottle had been dropped in the water that day from the sailing vessel Pilar at the equator, near the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The note included a letter from Diane Pool to her grandson, Joshua. It was sent on his 4th birthday. The dollar bill was included to pay for the letter to be forwarded to him once the bottle was found.

The writing was faint and it was difficult for the Stantons to make out what it said.

"I know this will be a late birthday present, but we are on the ocean sailing on the Pilar," the letter read in part. The letter said they had been at sea for nearly four years. It described how flying fish would sometimes land on the boat's deck and become their dinner.

Stanton said she was moved by the letter and felt obligated to somehow get the letter to the boy. She also hoped to contact the grandmother who sent the letter.

"I felt I had to find these people," said Stanton, 52, who works as a bus driver for the Entiat School District.

She had the address on the letter, but didn't know if it still was good after 16 years. She called real estate agents and the Ventura County, Calif., assessor and found out the house at the address on the letter was a rental. She called newspapers and television stations trying to find out anything she could about a woman named Diane Pool and a young man named Joshua Pratt. She searched Google and Facebook without success.

One Entiat teacher suggested she bring the letter in and look at it under a microscope to see if she could make out more words that could be clues. The closer reading provided just that. Diane Pool mentioned her husband's name in one sentence Stanton hadn't noticed before.

The top suggestion offered by Google when she entered the names "Bill and Diane Pool" on her computer was a blog called "Village Idiot Savant." The entry was from Jan. 20, 2006. It described an American couple who sailed from California in 1991 on their yacht, the Pilar. After nine years of sailing the Pacific and stopping briefly at various ports, they dropped anchor in Bonbonon Bay in the Philippines and stayed. The blog entry told about the small school Bill and Diane Pool founded in 2002.

Stanton then Googled the "One Candle Schoolhouse" mentioned in the blog. The school had a website. She found out that Diane Pool still was operating the school -- offering computer training to children in the small fishing village -- but her husband recently had died.

"I had chills running up and down my body when we found out that was her," Stanton said. She e-mailed Diane Pool the same day she discovered the website, April 27. She wrote that she had found the note to Pool's grandson in a bottle.

Stanton and Pool have been e-mailing each other daily ever since, Stanton said. Joshua, 20 this month and living in Huntington Beach, Calif., also has e-mailed Stanton and thanked her for her efforts to find them. Stanton plans to mail him the letter and the bottle this week.

Long before her marriage to Bill, Diane, who is now 61, had given up Joshua's mother for adoption at birth, she wrote Stanton. She found and reunited with her daughter shortly before Joshua's birth and met Joshua only once, when he was an infant, before Diane and Bill had set out to sea.

"It opened up a whole can of feeling for the family, but she thinks finding the bottle has brought them all closer together," said Stanton, who hopes to meet Diane in person one day.