Photo: Carol and Brian Smith/Educational Passages
Brian Smith posed with a boat made from a kit at a Massachusetts school. He and his wife found it after it washed ashore on Dalyellup Beach in Australia.
How’s this for a school project? Following a boat you built as it braves the high seas for science.
Steve Annear (who in my opinion gets all the fun assignments at the Boston Globe) reported on the excitement of hearing that the first of several such research boats was found after more than a year.
“After spending 463 days on the unforgiving ocean, the ‘Sacred Heart Star of the Sea’ made its final landing on the shores of Western Australia late last month, plucked from the sand by an unsuspecting couple out for a sunset stroll.
“It was a long and closely watched voyage that began in the classrooms of the Sacred Heart School in Kingston last year, where students assembled the small ship as part of a class project before it was packed with a GPS monitoring system and a weighted keel, and [taken to a launch site] in the Indian Ocean with dozens of personal letters to whomever might discover it one day.
“Now, that day has come. And at its new home on the other side of the planet, the miniature research vessel is being heralded as something of a small-town hero, paraded around to schools and local offices as residents marvel at it.
” ‘This boat is a popular chat topic,’ said William Power, a geoscientist in Australia who had been tracking the boat’s final movements toward land, in an e-mail.
“On July 2, officials from Bunbury posted on Facebook about the vessel’s arrival at a beach in Dalyellup, a southern suburb.
“Though a search party led by Power had scoured the beach a few days earlier, hoping to find the mini-boat, it was Carol and Brian Smith who happened upon the ‘Star of the Sea’ first. …
“Carol Smith said in an e-mail, ‘What caught our attention was the sticker that said, “If found please e-mail” … We didn’t know at the time but groups were looking for the mini-boat.’
“The couple strapped it to their roof rack and took it home. After doing research, they learned the boat was part of an educational mission by students in Kingston, some 10,000 miles away.
The boat was put together by students at the Catholic school in January last year, led by Maine-based Educational Passages, a nonprofit that supplies students with kits to construct the ships, send them out to sea, and track them online. …
“When the 5½-foot boat eventually landed in Australia, its sail and mast were gone, and it was covered in barnacles, Smith said, a sure signs of an arduous journey that lasted more than a year. But the rest was spared, including the letters onboard.
” ‘It was so exciting to open up the waterproof compartment, and see all the intact letters,’ Smith said. …
“Winifred Dick, an English teacher at the school, [helped] get the boat kit from Educational Passages. Dick’s husband, Henry, is a chief scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and was the lead chief scientist on the cruise at Marion Rise, where the vessel was first lowered into the sea. …
“The boat first visited Australind Primary School, where Smith teaches, and is now on display at City of Bunbury offices. It will go on to visit other schools, and later Fremantle, a port city near Perth. …
“At some point the boat will undergo repairs. There’s also talk of sending it back out on the water for another adventure.”
More at the Boston Globe, here.
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