On a cold, windy evening in February, Captain Junior Labour and his crew were headed back to shore after a day of lobster fishing about three hours off the coast of Port Mouton, N.S. when one of his brand new buoys went flying off the boat.

The fierce winds and choppy waters managed to snap off just one of the three buoys tied to the sides of the “Nicholas & Sisters '16” vessel.

“It just went adrift,” Labour recalled to CTVNews.ca during a phone interview on Tuesday. “We only noticed when we got in that one of the new buoys was gone.”

Thinking nothing of it, the fisherman of 38 years replaced the buoy with a new one and went on with his day.

“I figured I’d never see it again,” Labour shrugged.

Six months later, something unexpected happened.

Labour was perusing a Facebook group he belongs to called “Nova Scotia Fishing Boats” on Tuesday morning when one particular post caught his eye.

A woman by the name of Tracey Williams had uploaded a photo of bright red and black buoy resting on a sandy beach. In the post, Williams said she found it washed ashore near her home in Cornwall, England.

She said the buoy had the text “Nicholas & Sisters” inscribed on it along with Labour’s phone number. The phone number offered Williams a clue about the buoy’s origin.

“Could it be from Nova Scotia?” she wrote. “I’d love to know where it started its journey.”

Labour immediately recognized the buoy as the one he had lost in February and messaged the woman to let her know. He said Williams had offered to send him his buoy back.

He declined, however, because Williams had also asked if he would be willing to donate it to another fisherman in the area who had lost all of his fishing gear when his boat sank recently.

“I said, ‘By all means, give it to him,’” Labour recalled. “I don’t want someone to send it from England. The buoy was like $85 but it would probably cost more than that to send it to me.”

Instead, Labour is just marveling at the more than 4,400-kilometre journey his buoy took across the Atlantic Ocean.

“I was just pretty shocked. I can’t believe it went that far. That’s a long ways,” he said. “It’s an amazing story really, for something like that to be found that far away.”