Florida woman finds a message in a bottle after Tropical Storm Debby

Suzanne Flament-Smith had already filled two bags of debris that had washed ashore from Tropical Storm Debby — water bottles, sunscreen, beer cans and old shoes — when she spotted a glass bottle poking out of a trash heap alongside a trail near Tampa.

Flament-Smith initially worried that a bottle thrown into the ocean might contain cremated human ashes. But behind the grains of sand that flecked the inside of the glass, she spotted dark-blue cursive writing.

It was a letter.

Flament-Smith and her family cracked open the bottle on Wednesday, she said, and found a thin piece of paper dated “3/4/45″ and addressed to “Lee.” The letterhead was from a U.S. Navy training base in Virginia Beach, about 730 miles away — one that was established in 1942 and is still operational.

Most of the ink was difficult to read — presumably due to sun exposure — but Flament-Smith could decipher enough to guess the correspondence was from a conversation between friends. At one point, the author appeared to write about a bar near the base having “pretty good beer.”

Flament-Smith, 46, posted a picture of the note on Facebook, hoping to track down the families of the letter’s author and intended recipient.

“I never expected to come across something like this,” she told The Washington Post.

Kristina Higgins, a spokeswoman for the Naval History and Heritage Command, said in an email to The Post that the letterhead appears legitimate but that she doesn’t know who wrote the letter or why it was put in a bottle.

When Tropical Storm Debby hit Florida last week, leading to at least five deaths in the state, Flament-Smith said roads flooded near her Odessa house. There was also flooding near the trail she enjoys walking in Safety Harbor, a few feet from the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

Flament-Smith returned to that path Wednesday for the first time since the storm struck, after dropping off her 15-year-old daughter, Abby, at volleyball practice. Soon after she started walking, she realized that the trash bags and gloves she keeps in her Tesla’s trunk for picking up trash would come in handy: Piles of debris had washed ashore.

After opening her third trash bag, Flament-Smith said she spotted the glass bottle, which was sealed with a worn cork. Speculating that the bottle might contain cremated human remains, she worried about damaging it until she saw the dark-blue ink. She put it in her trunk and continued to pick up trash for roughly another hour.

At home that evening, Flament-Smith said she and her husband, Daryl, and Abby gathered around their kitchen table with the bottle in front of them. They called Flament-Smith’s 18-year-old son, Riley, who was at college, for the reveal.

Flament-Smith opened the cork but struggled to remove the letter. So she smacked the glass on her porch’s brick pavement, revealing the letter, a bullet casing, an iron ball the size of a Whoppers milk ball, and sand, she said. The paper was thin and worn, Flament-Smith said, as if it might rip if not handled gently.

“Dear Lee,” the letter appears to begin. “Received your letter yesterday, was glad to hear from you. So you got a little lit up the other day. Well that is a every day thing around here. They have a bar and they have pretty good beer.”

Flament-Smith said she wondered whether “lit up” referred to getting drunk or something violent — March 1945 was two months before Germany surrendered in World War II.

The author later appears to write that they are going to “Radio School.” Near the end of the missive, the author seems to say that they will write again the next day.

The U.S. Navy Amphibious Training Base in the Little Creek region of Virginia Beach, where the letterhead is from, trained more than 200,000 Navy and 160,000 U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps personnel during World War II, according to the Navy. Its name changed to the Naval Amphibious Base at Little Creek in 1945.

Flament-Smith shared the letter on Facebook in hopes that other people could help answer her many questions. One question she and Higgins posed was why the letter appears to have ended up in the ocean if it was meant for a specific person.

“Were they friends?” Flament-Smith said she wonders. “Was he on a ship? Did they throw it from the Navy base?”

Having lost her father, Gregory Flament, to throat cancer in 2009, Flament-Smith said she would be ecstatic if someone found a relic from his past. She hopes to deliver a memento to the families associated with the letter, which she is storing in a plastic bag for now.

She said she has made a list of the more than two dozen people who have contacted her on social media, planning to keep in touch with them in hopes they can help lead her to the letter writer and the intended recipient.

“There’s something so cool about seeing human history in a real, tangible form like that,” Flament-Smith said. “It brings it to life.”