A North Fork couple made a special discovery while walking on a beach near their home.

Sandy Wicklund normally takes home buckets of rocks, shells and driftwood from the beach down from her Riverhead home. But on April 30, she found a different kind of treasure in the sand.

"As I was walking, I just happened to look down, said Sandy Wicklund. "There was a bottle, so I picked it up and it looked like there was a message in it, and sure enough, there was."

Inside was a message from 6-year-old Ryan Michel from Orange, Connecticut. He had thrown the bottle into the Long Island Sound on Jan. 12.

In the message, Michel wrote his favorite color is red, and asked the person who finds the bottle to reuse it to send a new message.

The message was traced back to Michel after Sandy Wicklund posted a photo of it on social media.

"A friend of mine from work saw the post and sent it to me and asked me if that was my boys, and I said, 'yup, that's them,'" said Kelly Michel.

Sandy and Scott Wicklund say they plan on placing the original message with their own message back in the bottle and send it off to sea to see where it ends up next.

Sandy Wicklund says she hopes the message will bring a ray of sunshine to someone else the way it did for her family.

Ryan Michel's cousin Trevor also tossed a message in a bottle into the Long Island sound on the same day. That bottle has not yet been found.