New Hampshire students launched a boat in 2020 It was found last month

RYE, New Hampshire — After a group of New Hampshire students built a roughly six-foot-long miniature boat and filled it with gifts in late 2020, they set it out in the Atlantic Ocean, hoping it would eventually wash ashore and be opened by someone across the globe. While some students at Rye Junior High School wished for it to drift to Europe, then-sixth grader Solstice Reed wasn’t as convinced the voyage would be successful. “Honestly, I thought it would sink,” she admitted. Fortunately, to her and her peers’ pleasant surprise, Reed’s initial skepticism turned out to be unfounded. The Rye Riptides boat, equipped with a tracking device, spent 462 days at sea and registered its coordinates at different points throughout its journey. And this month, at long last, a curious sixth-grader in Smøla, a small island near Dyrnes, Norway, found the semi-dismantled boat, later bringing it to his school and opening it with his own delighted classmates. The cross-continent trek for Rye Riptides, which students and now-retired Rye Junior High School science teacher Sheila Adams stuffed with photos of the Rye students, a facemask with their signatures on it, fall leaves, acorns and state quarters, was conducted with the help of Educational Passages. The Maine-based nonprofit’s goal is to teach students about the ocean and its global impacts. It first began working with Adams on the project in 2018. The project was halted during the 2019-2020 school year after the pandemic shut down schools.“Devastating. The kids were devastated, too, so it was kind of difficult,” Adams said. However, the former group of students and a new class of fifth-graders banded together to send the boat out in October 2020 at the Gulf Stream off of Florida. With a GPS attached, the students were able to map the mini-boat's location until it went silent. Students continued to check every day. Amid hurricane season last year, the GPS on Rye Riptides came back online, registering plot points on Aug. 18 and on Sept. 30 around the same latitude as Ireland. However, from there and during the fall and early winter, it went silent again. Exactly four months later on Jan. 30, Cassie Stymiest, the executive director of Educational Passages, got an update: Rye Riptides had appeared to hit land just west of a small island in Norway. Quickly, she put out an alert on the Educational Passages website: “This is an educational project built by students in Rye, New Hampshire, U. S. A. Contact Educational Passages for more information and if you know anyone that can assist in a recovery to avoid damage to the vessel. It is an unscrewed vessel, like a message in a bottle, but we would like to recover it and have it brought to a nearby school to connect students.”Stymiest wrote to a Norwegian Facebook group, which posted about the small vessel. Local Norwegian news outlets picked up the story to spread the word. One local sixth-grader, Karel Nuncic, and his family heard about the crashed boat.


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Article Link: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/02/16/new-hampshire-students-mini-boat-found-norway/6811208001/


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