Canoga Park Couple’s Bottled Note Finds a Reader 4,000 Miles Away : Romance: On an impulse, the message was tossed from a cruise ship in the Bahamas, complete with a $2 reward to the finder.

A romantic night in the Rosenfelds’ past came back, in a plain brown wrapper.

Sarena Rosenfeld pulled an inconspicuous envelope from her Canoga Park mailbox. It bore a British postmark, but no return address. “Odd,” she wondered. “Who do I know in England?”

She slit it open, scanned the words, then phoned her husband, Sam, at his Reseda pawnshop.

“Sam, you won’t believe this,” she said.

“They found our bottle.”

On a romantic impulse after an idyllic wedding anniversary dinner in 1991 aboard a cruise ship in the Bahamas, the Rosenfelds took the green champagne bottle they had just emptied, put in a note with their name and address and offering a $2 reward to the finder, corked the bottle and hurled it into the Atlantic about 150 miles east of Miami.

Long since forgotten, the bottle washed up in December--over 4,000 miles northeast of the Bahamas, according to an Englishman who said he found it.

Richard Woollhead said he saw the bottle come ashore on the tide while walking his Labrador retriever on a beach on the Isle of Wight, a tourist and shipping destination about five miles off the south coast of England.

Woollhead, 46, a sales representative from Bath, England, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he had gone to visit relatives on the island before Christmas and was just taking in the crisp, windy morning when he spotted the bottle surprisingly intact on the rocky shoreline. Then he noticed the message inside.

“You hear about this sort of thing happening to other people, but never to you,” Woollhead said. Because his 20-year-old daughter, Jackie, likes to write letters, he took the message home to Bath and asked her to respond.

She sent the Rosenfelds two maps of Britain and returned their note, scrawled with faded ink.

“June 7, 1991. This bottle was put into the sea leaving Great Stirrup Cay, Bahamas, going to Miami, Florida,” read the faded letter, written on SS Norway stationery and curled from its long confinement in the bottle. “Please write and let me know where this bottle was found. I will send back $2 to you. Thank you, Samson Rosenfeld.”

Jackie Woollhead, in a spirit of generosity, wrote back: “Don’t worry about the $2.”

The Rosenfelds, when they received the letter from England last week, initially could not believe the flask had traveled all that distance. Oceanographers, however, said the bottle’s course made sense, given the currents in the area.

“It’s quite possible that the bottle floated west to east” with prevailing currents from the Straits of Florida, said Neal Sullivan, director of the Hancock Institute of Marine Studies at USC. When it intersected with the Gulf Stream, it probably shot northeast to England, he said.

Sam, 61, recalled the warm night at sea when he penned the note “on a whim.” He and Sarena, 52, had celebrated their 15th anniversary at dinner with several other couples to the sounds of tropical music and clinking champagne glasses. After finishing a bottle, they wandered up to the ship’s aft deck for a romantic walk under the stars, he said.

“As a kid I’d read adventure stories--sailing adventures--of writing notes and tossing them off ships in a bottle,” he said. Feeling inspired, he stuffed notes into two empty bottles and heaved them as far as he could over the ship’s crashing wake.

Sarena remembered that she just laughed at him. “Who’s going to send it back for just $2?” she asked.

Although one bottle washed ashore, the other remains at large. “It could have been smashed on rocks, or swallowed by a fish, or sunk . . . or who knows?” Sam said, looking again at the folded maps and letters in his pawnshop, Collateral Loans.

John Middleton, a pawnshop employee, stared at Rosenfeld in disbelief, asking: “Why do things like this always happen to him?”

Sam shrugged. The couple’s adventures have ranged from jaunts down the Thames River to Amsterdam canal trips. Once, in Rome, the Rosenfelds got into one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants by insisting they were pals of “Claude,” a food writer and friend of the restaurant owner who reviewed the eatery in an airline magazine they had read. They escaped without detection and even collected a free bottle of wine in the process, Sarena said.

“We’re determined not to lead a quiet life,” said Sarena, a painter and sculptor. “We just raise hell wherever we go.”

Last summer, Sam Rosenfeld said, they took a trip to Bournemouth in southern England, where they stood on a rocky point overlooking the Isle of Wight. They never imagined their bottle would follow them a few months later to the same spot.

The Rosenfelds are not sure where they will go on their next vacation, but the bottle’s return has set Sarena thinking.

“Now that we know that throwing out a bottle works,” she said, “we’ll have to find a bigger bottle and both hop in it.”