Emails, chatrooms and websites are renowned as the most modern way for putting strangers in touch.

But now the high-tech abilities of the internet are being used to keep one of the oldest forms of communication alive. People from all over the globe are logging on to a Brighton-based website so they can send a personal message in a bottle from the Palace Pier.

Web-surfers from as far afield as the USA, India and South Africa have sent their messages to be bottled up and thrown into the sea off Brighton. The man behind the brainwave is 38-year-old Stuart Conway, who operates the service out of the goodness of his heart.

Stuart, of Shelley Road, Hove, said: "I was sailing off the coast of Worthing one day and I started thinking about the internet and I just came up with the idea. It allows people who live in the middle of a country and not anywhere near the sea, such as the middle of the United States, to send a message in a bottle for whatever reason."

When people log on to www.conwasa.demon.co.uk/bottle.htm they are asked to enter their message on a web form. They then choose their preferred choice of bottle from options including a wine bottle and a film cannister.

There is also a joke option of a bottle made from compacted seagull food. Stuart prints the messages off, puts them in a sealed bottle and drops them into the sea off the Palace Pier.

He said: "I have to wait until the wind is right or the bottles just end up back on Brighton beach. Sometimes I have a backlog of bottles so I wait until I go on holiday and then throw them off the side of the boat as we cross the Channel. The messages vary. There have been some from Americans who have wanted to bottle their problems up and throw them away.

"There are love letters to people who will never see them, anonymous poems and thoughts and messages from religious groups. People have sent messages from South America, North America, Australia, India, Sweden, Greece, Germany, South Africa and a school in Hong Kong used the service as a project. I will send anything as long as it isn't offensive and there's no charge."

Despite sending out more than 600 messages in the past four years, Stuart has only had feedback from a handful of people. He received two emails from people in France who had found messages on a beach eight days after they were dropped into the sea.

Stuart, who works on computer systems support, said: "I have heard about five or six bottles that were found, but apparently the average time for a bottle to reach anywhere is a couple of decades!"

The oldest message recorded was washed up on an Australian beach in 1982 after 73 years. However, a trawlerman in the Thames estuary recently found a bottle containing a farewell note from a First World War soldier to his wife written as he sailed to France in 1914. Twelve days after he dispatched his bottle, 26-year-old Private Thomas Hughes was killed on his first day in the trenches.

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