A bottle floating in a Mississippi River with a 40-year-old handwritten note stuffed inside sent a retired teacher-turned-treasure hunter on a mystery quest

• Jeremy Weir found a note in a bottle dated June 4, 1983, floating in the Pearl River on Monday.
• Weir set out to find the man who wrote and left his phone number on the note.
• "Good Luck and Happy Hunting," was written on the bottom of the letter.

A retired Mississippi teacher set out to find the owner of a 40-year-old message in a bottle that he found floating in the Pearl River in Mississippi on Monday.

Jeremy Weir, a retired middle school principal, is a self-described treasure hunter. Weir said that he is "always hunting treasure (and by treasure I mean old bottles, old wood, sea glass, fossils, etc)," in a Facebook post on Monday.

"Well while hunting this afternoon I found an old Grolsch bottle with a ceramic top in a big drift on the Pearl River," Weir wrote in the post. "I brought it home and started to clean it up and noticed something in it. I opened it and found a plastic bag with a note in it."

Weir said that the note inside the bottle was dated June 4, 1983, and it told the reader to contact a man named David Blanks who lived in Jackson, Mississippi, and was 3 years old at the time the note was written.

"Good Luck and Happy Hunting," the note said.

Weir said in the post that with the help of his daughter he was able to find the man mentioned in the note and he plans to meet with him and his wife to return the bottle.

Weir told the Sun Herald that he called the phone number on the note and reached Blanks' parents, who gave him Blanks' contact information.

"So we called him and, of course, he was just astonished that we had found that bottle, 39 and a half years later," Weir to the Herald. "We talked with him and his wife, and told him what was going on."

Blanks was "ecstatic" to hear that Weir had found the bottle and said that he didn't remember writing the note as a 3-year-old, the Herald reported.