The Miniboat Traffic Report provides updates on miniboats at sea, new launches and landings, and other fun events that happen in between our full episodes.
This episode includes updates on the following miniboats and projects:
iFADO IV (El Hierro - Mar, Salitre y Lava)
The Serendipitous Transatlantic Tale of One Tiny but Mighty Boat by Syma A. Ebbin.
The Lancer Story: A Special 30-minute Webinar December 19
Donate to Educational Passages
Cape Cod Sea Turtle Project – Educational Passages
Morristown Beard School (Crimson Cyclone, Crimson Current, Crimson Tide, etc)
Track all miniboats currently at sea from https://educationalpassages.org/events/atsea/
If you would like to send us feedback please email: info@educationalpassages.org
Educational Passages is a non-profit organization that seeks to connect people around the world to the ocean and each other through unique global experiences.
The Miniboat Traffic Report provides updates on miniboats at sea, new launches and landings, and other fun events that happen in between our full episodes.
This episode includes updates on the following miniboats and projects:
iFADO IV (El Hierro - Mar, Salitre y Lava)
The Serendipitous Transatlantic Tale of One Tiny but Mighty Boat by Syma A. Ebbin.
The Lancer Story: A Special 30-minute Webinar December 19
Donate to Educational Passages
Cape Cod Sea Turtle Project – Educational Passages
Morristown Beard School (Crimson Cyclone, Crimson Current, Crimson Tide, etc)
Track all miniboats currently at sea from https://educationalpassages.org/events/atsea/
If you would like to send us feedback please email: info@educationalpassages.org
Educational Passages is a non-profit organization that seeks to connect people around the world to the ocean and each other through unique global experiences.
Welcome to the Educational Passages podcast. This is the Miniboat Traffic Report. Educational Passages is a non-profit organization that seeks to connect people around the world to the ocean and each other through unique global experiences. I'm your host, Cassie Stymiest. Since our last traffic report on October 17th, we saw six launches, five landings and five recoveries. It's now the middle of December and you can see there are lots of adventures happening, which is why it's been a little bit long since our last traffic report. So let's dive in.
Cassie:Let's start with the Purple Hurricane. This is the boat we mentioned last time that made a complete transatlantic voyage from off the coast of North Carolina all the way to Wales in just about a year. It was actually its second voyage. The students were so excited to see their boat reach another place and across the pond, as they say. When we saw the Purple Hurricane approach the Pembrokeshire coast, we reached out to our friend Ben James for some help and recently he shared his whole story, which he kindly wrote up for us and I will share with you here.
Cassie:My adventure began on a stormy Friday evening when I got an email from Cassie saying that another mini boat was heading towards the UK coast and Pembrokeshire in Wales, where I live. I helped retrieve the Osprey back in 2016 after it washed ashore just five miles from here. I quickly got onto the tracking website and could see that the Purple Hurricane was close to coming ashore, about 25 miles west of where I live in Tenby. So I got a plan together to head over there the next day, saturday, but unfortunately Saturday's weather was terrible, with very strong winds and heavy rain, and so was Sunday, so I couldn't make the trip fate safely. Luckily, on Monday, the weather was much better, so I made a plan to head out after work about 4 pm with my drone to help me search a larger area and get close to any objects that I might see but not be able to get to. It took me about an hour to get there, as the roads are really winding and narrow once you get close to the area where Purple Hurricane made land. I parked up, grabbed my drone and headed out across fields using Google Earth on my phone to find the way to where the GPS coordinates last located the boat. Before long I came to what looked like a field on Google Maps but turned out to be a lake. Luckily, I managed to find a path around it and carried on my way. Just when I thought I was about there, having got onto the cliff path, I came around a bend to find the path blocked by a load of cows that had escaped from a field where the fence blew down in a storm a few days before. To top it off, there was a huge bull with massive horns there staring straight at me. Thankfully, they were too interested in the grass to bother me and let me walk straight past them. I was soon at the spot where the Purple Hurricane sent its last signal, but it was way too windy to fly the drone, so I could only search from the top of the cliff. After thoroughly searching the whole area for an hour and a half, and with daylight fading quickly and finding nothing but seals, I had to turn around and back to the car. As soon as the tides allow the weather to improve, I am going back with the drone to take another look." So thanks, ben and your whole family who took part in that adventure, for helping to try to locate the Purple Hurricane. Over in the Pacific.
Cassie:We hosted that zoom gathering with crew members from the Boat to Freedom on October 19th. To recap, the Boat to Freedom was recently found in Hawaii. It was launched back in July 2022, but only reported for 176 days. It went silent on December 5th 2022 but was found by divers. A father and son pair spotted it underwater and retrieved it for us, and we were able to virtually gather everyone together over zoom. We also saw another launch in Alaska recently. On October 20th, we saw the Chapman Middle School's second mini boat, their first being APAK, which landed in the Aleutian Islands. This is mini boat called 907 Seas. The students even did a podcast while building their mini boat this time and we will definitely share that out next year. They launched it into Kachemak Bay, Alaska, which they intended to do because they wanted to have a short voyage so that they could test it out and collect some data. The 907 Seas is also mini boat number 199 for Educational Passages. That mini boat will be headed out to the open Pacific soon enough, so stay tuned for that and is all part of a project called SEAOTECH thanks to BOOM, and we'll be building more mini boats coming up, so stay tuned Back in the Atlantic.
Cassie:We watched Special skirt around the Azores for a while and has since sailed off to the northeast. We think the Sea Eagle is also about a thousand nautical miles from Europe now and iFADO 4 is still headed for South America, even after a trip going all the way over to the east, and now looks like it's headed west again. Dream Sailor is still in the Gulf Stream and Clipper Ripper drifted over the Corner Sea mounts recently, which means it is still out there as well. Just a couple weeks ago, we hit a huge milestone, as 2023 is the 10th birthday of Educational Passages as a non-profit. How fitting is it that we just saw mini boat number 200 launched? This is thanks to Captain John and the crew of the F/V, Rachel Leah and the Little Bay Lobster Company, who's launched a couple for us this year, as they set to sail the Tapping of the Seas. This was after a shakedown cruise in Lake Winnisquam on November 10th and, from naming it to putting notes inside, all 311 students at Gilford Elementary School have taken part in getting Tapping of the Seas ready for this launch. The build was inspired by the Rye Ript ides mini boat and it's really nice to see those ripples turning into waves. In Ireland, we connected with the Raven Kaster relaunch team in Achill Island, who have installed the sensors in the Raven Kaster. This is an upgrade to the original mini boat and we'll be collecting a lot of information when it is set to sail, hopefully next year and also in Ireland.
Cassie:We are still in touch with the Crimson Current team in Cork and recently had a really interesting connection with Crimson Current that I will tell you about From the Barryroe National Schools Facebook page. They posted this recently Well, well, well. When mini boat turned up on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts after traveling across the Atlantic this summer, we thought we would never see her again. However, 6th class student Nadine Hayes and her Aunt, Mary, had other ideas. Nadine and her Mum, Gertie, flew to Nantucket this week to celebrate Thanksgiving and, with the help of Mary, managed to track down our boat. So isn't that great. There was a student from the class in Cork that had prepared Crimson Current to go back out to sea, that has an Aunt in Nantucket and we had connected with Mary the aunt on Instagram, who is helping us out locally, and now with three mini boats that are on Nantucket. So we're really building off of all of these adventures, and Morristown Baird themselves, with the Crimson Current being their 10th mini boat, are building off of their first one, which was back in 2012, the Crimson Tide and Crimson, tide being one of those three mini boats that are sitting there on Nantucket. Just the other day, I actually zoomed with the Morristown Baird School as they are preparing their 11th mini boat, named Crimson Cyclone, and it all reminds me of the special podcast episode that we did with Ashley and Mrs Swanson. You should check it out. 10 years and 10 mini boats, and I just love how these stories keep building on each other.
Cassie:Another great example of that is with the Lancer, which is a boat that started in 2016 and was recently featured in a BBC2 documentary series highlighting the work of the National Marine Aquarium. We worked with them in 2019 when I met their head of education at a conference, and since then it has been an absolute grand adventure. They sponsored Project OCN and had Lancer at their STEM Fest last October, where over 1,400 students came from all over the UK to the Aquarium and got to learn about Lancer. A group of students at Torbridge School took on the task of upgrading it with a new cargo hold and sensors so that it could collect information about the ocean. The boat is launched just about a year ago now, actually from Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and all along the way, it sailed only with the wind and currents and we tracked it on its westward journey. You may recall that on Earth Day, we also saw it recovered by a wonderful couple in the Bahamas and since then there has just been a wonderful full circle with Kaitlyn with, who is the student that started the project in 2016.
Cassie:To find out more about these connections and what has happened since 2016, there's the BBC documentary. There's also a Connecticut Sea Grant magazine in Wracklines that tells all about the story and how it is promoting ocean literacy. I would recommend having a read through that article or watching the documentary or joining our special webinar on December 19th. If you're not able to sign up or you're hearing this after that date, reach out, let me know and we will get you connected with that story. This webinar and our year-end appeal highlights how a mini-boat can be a blank canvas and can give students like Kaitlyn a life-changing experience, so please consider donating to educational passages during your year-end giving.
Cassie:As a non-profit, we rely on public support to keep us going, and wouldn't you like to be responsible for helping one of these mini-boat adventures and dreams come true? Your donation of $100 will allow 20 more students the life-changing opportunity to participate in this program. Every dollar helps to empower students like Kaitlyn to craft their own narratives and foster both local and global impacts. We need to raise $10,000 by December 31st in order to support over 200 classes starting in January. Your generosity truly matters.
Cassie:In 2024, we'll share new stories and more on the latest Cape Cod Bay deployments to help cold-stunned sea turtles. This is a continued project with lots of exciting new developments to share with you, including all about the launches we've had these last couple of weeks and the students and whole community in the Cape Cod area that have been involved. Keep an eye out for our expanding at-sea fleet too, as more mini-boats are in the final building stages, like the Crimson Cyclone we mentioned, but also the Grizzly Bear from Barnes Elementary School in Kelso, Washington, who is scheduled to have its christening ceremony this week. This will probably be the last podcast episode of 2023, and there is so much this year to be grateful for. I'm truly excited for what 2024 will bring and I really hope you will join us every step of the way. Your enthusiasm really fuels these adventures and contributes to a global community of learners, explorers and ocean lovers. I'll leave you with a little something that Kaitlyn said in a recent conversation about what it's like to see the Lancer project continue seven years later. She said "Wow, high School Caitlin never imagined where I would be today in my life and this project is still having an impact on so many people. I'm very thankful for this project, as it connected so many people and introduced kids to the ocean community. That's it for this week's mini-boat traffic report.
Cassie:Head on over to the Educational Passages website, educationalpassagesorg slash at sea to explore the tracks and stories yourself. Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of the Educational Passages podcast. Educational Passages is a non-profit organization. Please consider making a donation to help us continue our work bringing people together to learn more about the ocean. To donate, visit educationalpassagesorg slash support. If you're enjoying this program, please consider subscribing to the podcast an Apple podcast, spotify, google podcast or for more, ever you download your podcasts. Thanks for listening.