ASTORIA, Ore. – When Christopher Wattam was 11, he knew something about geography that he wanted to share with somebody, perhaps in Asia.

Here’s what he wrote in a message he and his parents put in a wine bottle and pitched into the Pacific Ocean:

“Dear Finder,” he said, explaining that “you may not know” the location of his hometown. “Coquitlam is a city near Vancouver. Now if you don’t know where Vancouver is, you don’t know your geography.”

“We live in Canada, which is our country,” he said. “You probably think of the Pacific Ocean as the East Coast but we know it as the West Coast and that is where Vancouver is.”

He asked anyone who read the message to send a postcard. His message was dated May 9, 1995.

Last weekend, 250 miles to the south, Mary Graham and her family were on their weekly beachcombing expedition at Sunset Beach, south of Astoria on the Oregon Coast. She saw Christopher Wattam’s wine bottle amid the flotsam at the high-tide mark.

“Holy moly, there’s a message in a bottle!” she remembered saying as she recounted the story to the Daily Astorian.

These days 22-year-old Christopher Wattam is working for a year as a geological technician at a mine in the Australian Outback, in between his junior and senior year at the University of British Columbia.

He’s a bit out of touch. The newspaper telephoned his parents, who still live in Coquitlam. They said there’s no telephone service to their son. They e-mailed him about the 11-year-old message in a bottle, but have gotten no response.

His father, David Wattam, said the message got launched when the family was on a weekend whale-watching expedition to the village of Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

David Wattam said he and his wife probably put Christopher up to it.

“We just watched it float it away. We never imagined it would get found by someone,” he said.

Where the bottle floated is anyone’s guess.

Mike Kosro, an associate professor of physical oceanography at Oregon State University, said it could have floated all around the Pacific Ocean, or it might have gotten stranded on a beach near Vancouver Island for years and only recently washed south in a storm.

Off Vancouver Island, the currents have an unusual circular pattern, he said.

“It could ride a little merry-go-round for a while, but it would be surprising for it to do that for as long as this bottle was out there,” he said.

The Daily Astorian reported that messages such as Wattam’s come and go in the region.

Almost three years ago, a local girl discovered a bottle near Fort Stevens State Park containing an 8-year-old message from a college student in Japan. The bottle was one of a half-dozen launched from Japan over a 13-year period that all washed up on beaches in Oregon and Washington in 2003.

Later that year, an Astoria boy received a package from a couple in Oahu, Hawaii, who had found a bottle he tossed into the ocean 18 months before as part of a project by his third-grade class at John Jacob Astor Elementary School.