For centuries, people have been fascinated by the idea of putting a message in a bottle and tossing it into the sea in the hopes that someone will find it. In 2020, students at Rye Junior High School in New Hampshire did something similar. Instead of a bottle, they filled a 1.5 meter (5 foot)-long sailboat with mementos and launched it into the ocean. The students hoped to use tracking technology to follow the boat’s journey across the sea and learn where it ended up.
The students built the small vessel, which they named the Rye Riptides, using a kit from a Maine-based organization called Educational Passages. The group helps students learn about wind and currents using “miniboats” designed to sail with moving ocean waters.
Sheila Adams, the students’ teacher, warned that the Rye Riptides might get lost at sea. As the boat sailed the high seas, it could encounter any number of problems, from rough weather to technological issues, that could end its voyage. So the class knew not to get their hopes up. “I really thought it would sink,” says Kiera Hagen, who was a student in Adams’s class during the project. But the boat’s journey surpassed expectations. It showed how the ocean connects everyone on the planet—and forged a surprising friendship with kids 13,400 kilometers (8,300 miles) away.