A five-foot unmanned sailboat put together by local elementary schools and the University of Rhode Island’s School of Oceanography was launched in March and has made it across the Atlantic.
It was discovered on a beach in England Thanksgiving weekend.
The boat, named "Inspiration" by Central Falls Elementary students at Veterans and the Raices Dual Language Academy, is no bigger than a bathtub.
Kim Alix's third grade class was part of the team that put the sailboat together, with help from URI's School of Oceanography and Central Falls High School students.
"The goal is to reach across the shore to see where it may end up and who may contact us. So it's a way of getting people to communicate," said Alix.
The 25 students in Mrs. Alix's class at Veterans Memorial had just the month of this past February to do their part to get “The Inspiration” ready to cross the Atlantic.
Fourth grade student A’Marie Brown remembers “when we would paint the boat, we would learn about different things about the ocean."
On board the unmanned sailboat was solar-powered battery wind and water temperature and GPS sensors for real time tracking.
Elijah Thornton, also a fourth grader, was puzzled about what the boat was going through, looking at the tracker. "It was like going in circles, like in loops."
Classmate Antonio Rodriguez was concerned that the boat “could get hit by a wave. It could flip the boat over."
Memorabilia and written messages were also placed in a sealed hatch.
On Thanksgiving weekend, a man strolling Dorset Beach in Christchurch, England, found the craft and read the instructions to take it to a nearby school, Tiptoe Elementary. His wife is a teacher there. A trans-Atlantic zoom call is planned for next week between both schools.
Mina Martinez, also a fourth grader at Veterans, is looking forward to that contact. "I'm mostly wondering who they are, how they are, what they like."
The 245-day, 9,300-mile journey, averaging less than 2 mph, will not be its last. The Tiptoe kids will give it a tune-up and send it off on its next random journey, a true multi-cultural pay-it-forward adventure to who knows where.