RURAL UTAH — Clint Buffington, a Utah resident who has recovered nearly 150 messages in bottles since 2007, found a bottle containing a note and an eight-year-old piece of wedding cake and traced it to Ed and Carol Meyers, a Virginia couple who had set it adrift while celebrating their first anniversary.

The Meyers subsequently attended Buffington's own wedding. "So, naturally, Ed & Carol came to our wedding & it felt like a blessing," Buffington wrote on Instagram.

Buffington, 41, lives in a landlocked state and is the default parent of two young children. He holds a master's degree in English literature and worked for some years as a technical writer for a nuclear-waste-removal company. He is also a musician who plays guitar, harmonica, and mandolin across genres. His wife is a surgeon.

The collection of bottles he has recovered since 2007 has yielded a wide range of contents. The messages ranged from love letters to promotional stunts, science projects, pleas for help, and drunken ramblings. A lone aluminum can among the bottles contained the dregs of a Bell's Two Hearted I.P.A.

Buffington's home office contains empty bottles on shelves and a bar cart with unopened bottles. He keeps tools in a garage workshop he calls the Lab, including a spray bottle, a U.V. black light, Channellock pliers, a rotary tool with a diamond drill bit, and laparoscopic needle drivers, which he uses to extract notes from sealed containers.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer estimated that six million messages in bottles have been tossed into the ocean since the mid-twentieth century.