A student project focusing on learning about the oceans saw high schoolers launch a small boat filled with mementoes drifting across the Atlantic.

Lost at sea for 462 days, the vessel finally struck land in remote Norway, where a young sixth-grade boy got to share it with his classmates.

Back in the 2019-20 school year, Rye Junior High students in the classroom of science teacher Sheila Adams were told that they would be participating in an experiment with Educational Passages, a Maine-based nonprofit that teaches about oceans and their impact.

However, after pandemic restrictions forced the students into remote learning, Ms. Adams instructed them to design a piece of personalized artwork that could be scanned and copied and placed on top of of the six-foot boat complete with mast, hull, and keel.

The following school year, Adams was assigned to a different fifth grade class who were also scheduled to work with Educational Passages. Adams and executive director for EP Cassie Stymiest decided to merge the project between the two classes, and asked the new kids to load the cargo hold with small trinkets and decide what colors the boat would be painted.

The boat, christened Rye Riptides was launched from Massachusetts's shore in October of 2020, equipped with a GPS tracker that occasionally would log waypoints showing the kids where their boat was.

During hurricane season the GPS stopped responding for a time, before turning back on on August 18th, and again on September 30th, after which it didn't transmit its location for four months.

"Honestly, I thought it would sink," Solstice Reed from the sixth grade class admitted to Seacoast Online.

Then on January 30th, Stymiest got an update: Rye Riptides had made landfall somewhere on the small island of Smøla off the coast of Norway.

"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," Stymiest wrote on a Norway Facebook group around the area in which the boat landed.

"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."

Local news outlets picked up the story and published it. A local sixth grader, Karel Nuncic, saw the story and along with his dog and family, went out on their boat to find Rye Riptides.

While the cargo hold was intact, everything else was lost, including the mast, hull, keel, and rudder. The brightly covered boat was covered in gooseneck barnacles from its long voyage.

Nuncic's sixth grade class are planning to write a letter in reply, since their English second language is quite good—Karel's mom even recorded him reading the letter contained in the boat written by the Rye students. The classes are also scheduled to have a video call.

"There's a magical thing, there's so much hope in it, you really just don't know what's going to happen. When you're sending it out, 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," Stymiest said. "But these kids, they put their hopes and dreams and wishes into it and I tend to think sometimes that helps."

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