Mary! Your message in a bottle has arrived...28 years later

A Canadian man's message in a bottle honouring his promise to write to a woman named Mary has finally washed ashore 28 years later in Croatia.

Surfers cleaning the debris from a beach at the mouth of the Neretva river in the southern Adriatic came across a half-broken bottle with a paper inside, Croatian newspaper Dubrovack Vjesnik said on its website on Wednesday.

A 23-year-old local surfer, who gave her name as Matea, nearly threw it away when she spotted a wet paper inside, which contained a message from Jonathon in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, which lies on Canada's eastern coast.

"Mary, you really are a great person. I hope we can keep in correspondence. I said I would write. Your friend always, Jonathon, Nova Scotia, 1985," said the message, which the daily carried in English.