Boat launched by New Hampshire students in 2020 lands in Norway
A small boat launched in October 2020 by middle schoolers in New Hampshire and containing photos, fall leaves, acorns and state quarters was found more than 400 days later – by a sixth-grader in Norway.
The 6-foot-long (1.8-meter) Rye Riptides, decorated with children’s artwork and equipped with a tracking device that went silent during parts of the trip, was found on February 1 in Smøla, a small island near Dyrnes, Norway. , reported the Portsmouth Herald.
She had lost her hull and keel during the 8,300 mile voyage and was covered in gooseneck barnacles, but the deck and hold were still intact. The student who found it, Karel Nuncic, took the boat to his school, and he and his classmates eagerly opened it last week. The school in Norway is planning a call soon with the students of Rye Junior High.
“When you send it, you have no idea where it’s going to end up, how it’s going to get there, if it ends up (anywhere) at all,” said Cassie Stymiest, executive director of Educational Passages, a Maine nonprofit that started working with the school on the project in 2018. “But these kids, they put their hopes and dreams and wishes into it, and I tend to think sometimes that helps.”
The students put the boat in the Atlantic Ocean and followed its course. They dealt with the retirement of their teacher, Shelia Adams, and the long periods when her GPS went silent.
The boat came back online during hurricane season, recording plot points in August and September around the same latitude as Ireland. Then he disappeared again. On January 30, they learned that the boat appeared to make landfall just west of a small island in Norway.
“I was surprised the boat got anywhere,” said seventh-grader Molly Flynn. “I thought it was going to get stuck in an in-between spot (on the map) and it did, and it was really, really cool and surprising.”