Robinson Crusoe never had this much luck when he tried to send an SOS to the world.

In an extraordinary tale of fate and the mystery of the high seas, not one but two messages in bottles found their way to strangers on the other side of the ocean just weeks after they were sent by a class of infants.

Youngsters in the reception class at St Andrew's Primary School in Hove wrote their messages during a writing project when they pretended they were stranded on a desert island.

Some asked to be rescued and pleaded with anybody who found the letter to write back to their school.

Teacher Fiona Blythe gave them to a fisherman, Sean Lees, of St Leonard's Gardens, Hove, whose children Brooke and Paige are at the school.

He took the bottles out to sea during a fishing trip on his trawler, Miranda, and cast them into the ocean 16 miles south of Hastings in July.

None of the adults or children really expected to hear anything about the messages ever again.

That is until sailor Patrick Majer and his crew made the youngsters' dreams come true.

Mr Majer, of Frankfurt, Germany, was drifting in open sea when he spotted a bottle floating in the water.

At first the crew ignored it but as they sailed by, one man saw there was a piece of paper inside.

The crew turned their yacht round and went back to fish it out of the water and were amazed to find the mysterious message from Yosteina Hakeen, Tom Fookes, Georgina Cairns and Skye Gumbrell.

As soon as Mr Majer reached dry land, he wrote back to the children to tell them of the discovery.

He sent a photograph of himself and his crew taking out the message which they found in the middle of the North Sea.

Mr Majer said: "We, visitors on a sailing boat, were just doing a sailing trip from Hamburg to Southampton in England.

"We did not have much luck with the wind, so we had to use the engine of the boat most of the travel time.

"But this gave us the possibility to look around, admire the sea and check the sea for the unexpected and there we found the bottle."

Mr Majer gave the children the exact co-ordinates of where the bottle was found so teachers could look up the location on a map.

The class was just calming down after the excitement this week when another letter arrived at the school from two Dutch children who had found the second of three messages thrown into the sea.

Jessica and Wendy Leistra, of Friesland, The Netherlands, found the other message sent by Siobhan Stack-Maddox and other children after the bottle was washed up on the shore near their homes.

The two children wrote straight back to the infants telling them where they found the bottle on August 9, 2001, just two weeks after it was cast into the sea.

Mrs Blythe said: "It was so exciting for the teachers and the children."

Georgina Cairns, six, said: "I was excited to get the letter."