Message in bottle from Laurie, 10, starts quest.

Byline: By Rhodri Phillips

A German woman is seeking to unravel the mystery of a message in a bottle ( sent from the North-East ( which she found while walking on a Danish beach.

Gudrun SchUnemann, [corr] 59, who lives near Hamburg, in northern Germany was on holiday near Esbjerg [corr], on the west coast of Denmark, last month.

The legal adviser, who works at a research centre, was walking on the beach when her dog Brenda, a rottweiler-German shepherd cross, retrieved a dirty bottle.

And though Gudrun's first instinct was to throw it away, when she looked closer she saw it contained a note and six British pennies.

The note was slightly damaged and some of the writing was too faint to read, but it appears to be from a 10-year-old called Laurie from Newcastle.

It is not clear whether the writer was a boy or a girl or when the note was sent, but the author goes on to describe their family life ( one dog, a mother called Lyne, [corr] a father, whose name is not clear on the note, and two brothers called Paul and Jordan.

The writer suggests the bottle's finder could spend the six pennies sent with the message on sweets and the note ends with the comment: "Chuck a bottle in the water to reply, please." The note contains no contact information for Laurie.

Gudrun was "very excited" about finding the bottle as she once threw a similar message into the river Elbe in Hamburg, although sadly received no reply.

She said: "Finding the bottle brought back a lot of memories. I must have been about 10 when I sent a similar message in a bottle. I remember it very well.

"When Brenda found the bottle on the beach I nearly threw it away because it was so dirty. No wonder, if it had floated all that way across the ocean.

"My friend told me to take it with me. I am glad I did."

Gudrun was on a three-week holiday in Jutland, a popular Danish tourist region, when Brenda made the discovery.

As soon as she arrived back home she looked on the internet for contact details for newspapers in the North-East of England and got in touch with The Journal.

She said: "The sender of this message asks for a reply. Unfortunately, the address is not given or perhaps has disappeared, because the paper of the letter was quite wet.

"The coins were modern British coins, but the bottle could have taken years to float across the North Sea. Laurie could be grown up by now. I would love to be able to find the sender."

If you are the note's writer or you know who might be, get in touch with The Journal on [phone].