Educational Passages Podcast
Educational Passages Podcast
Wow, Palau!
Season 4 of the Educational Passages Podcast continues with our “Imagine This” series - Where the magic of miniboats come alive through the voices and visions of those who make it all possible.
Each episode will paint a vivid picture of discovery, connection, and curiosity — not just tracking the voyages, but exploring the challenges and unexpected outcomes behind them.
Now press play, close your eyes, and imagine this:
How far can a summer project carry the dreams of a new generation of ocean explorers? Sparked by hands-on learning with the Oregon Coast STEM Hub, high school students along the Oregon coast build an uncrewed sailboat—the Yaquina Neversink—and launch it into the Pacific. What follows is an extraordinary eight-month voyage across thousands of miles. This miniboat’s resilient journey forges global connections, breaks records, and brings students closer to science, community, and the power of the ocean itself. Guided by a name rooted in hope and heritage, this tiny vessel proves just how far small beginnings can truly travel.
Visit https://educationalpassages.org/boats/yaquinaneversink/ for more information about the boat and project - and what happened next!
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. Educational Passages is a nonprofit organization that seeks to connect people around the world to the ocean and each other through unique global experiences. I'm your host, Cassie Stymist.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome everybody to season 4. Get ready to set sail on a brand new adventure as we launch our Imagine This series, where the magic of mini boats come alive through the voices and visions of those who make it all possible. In this series, each episode will paint a vivid picture of discovery, connection, and curiosity, not just tracking the voyages, but exploring the challenges and unexpected outcomes behind them. Now press play, close your eyes, and imagine this. It's summer on the Oregon Coast 2024. Students from several high schools in the Lincoln County School District gather at the Hatfield Marine Science Center for Summer Learning Programs with the Oregon Coast STEM hub. Those interested in marine engineering come together to build an uncrewed sailboat and learn about different careers as they do. For two weeks they prepare their vessel. They sand the fiberglass hull, ballast and attach the keel, install sensors measuring air and water temperature, orientation and transmitting location. They apply anti-fouling bottom paint and decorate the deck and sail. It's a lot of work, but one student says in a news article, but at the end of every day, I'd remind myself that I'm building a tiny unmanned research boat that will transmit important data for years. They aren't just building a boat, they're building connections to science, careers, to the ocean, each other, and getting ready to connect with classrooms far beyond wherever the boat will go. They choose a name rich in meaning, Yakina Neversink. Yakina honors the local bay and the native people who first lived on those lands. Neversink is their confident hope that this boat will endure. A new school year begins in September and the cargo hatch is sealed. The boat is brought to the docks and aboard the RV Bell M. Shimada. Their crew includes the OSU Plankton Ecology Lab, and they're going about 150 miles off the Oregon coast to work. On September 21st, the Yakina Neversink is launched to the open sea. A crew member sends this message. The students, though not on the ship themselves, watch the map back in their classrooms, tracking, waiting, imagining what might happen. Will the boat go across the Pacific? Will it come back to Oregon? Only time will tell. Now imagine that tiny craft floating free, powered by only the wind and currents, charting its own course across the Pacific. She traveled south with the winds at first, but then there was a big change in the weather and she changed course, moving first east, then north. Luckily the winds changed again and she headed south. Two weeks after launch, she had traveled 500 miles and was 300 miles offshore, still heading south. The crew predicts Hawaii or Micronesia as a final destination. A month goes by since the launch, and the mini boat has now traveled over a thousand miles, and the tracks start shifting westward. She continues west and exactly two months after launch, heads almost directly to the northeast coast of the island of Hawaii. Her speed is consistent, and so we put up a notice online and start reaching out to local contacts. Can you recover the boat if it makes land? She comes within three nautical miles of the island and then makes a sharp turn northwest and goes around. She doesn't go to Maui either, but sails right between, just saying aloha for now, but not ready to end the adventure just yet. She hangs out behind the islands for a week or two, watching the whales, resting for the longer journey ahead, then suddenly speeds off and heads southwest. Three months after launch, and it's now December 21st, Yakina traveled another 400 nautical miles west from Hawaii and is near Johnston atoll. By January 21st, she had sailed another thousand miles, looping once but keeping a westward goal. She is north of the Marshall Islands now. Another month later, she was just southeast of Guam and had sailed 1,500 more miles. By the beginning of March, she sailed through the Caroline Islands, which was another 500 miles since February 21st. Then she began to slow down and make much shorter distance spurts, back and forth, back and forth. It was getting hard to predict a final destination. From March to April, she covered a lot of distance, but not if you look at the start to finish. Did the wind stop? We keep checking every day for progress. In April, the sensors stop reporting, but we don't know why. The tracks keep going as the main GPS transmitter is still online. On May 19th, after eight months at sea, Yakina makes landfall on Kyangle in Palau, a nice sandy beach. We reach out to the Sea Grant network and quickly the boat is recovered the very next day. The pictures come in. The sail is still there, but the baton is a bit worn from the ceaseless motion of eight months of wind and wave. The drawings from the students in Oregon still there, just softened by months of sun and salt. The boat itself appears to be undamaged, no cracks, still seaworthy. How can this be? She spent two hundred and forty days at sea, two hundred and forty sunrises and sunsets, all alone across the mighty Pacific. From the cold gray swells off the Oregon coast to the deep open blue of the mid-Pacific, the Yakana Neversink faced it all. The Pacific is often cited as the most dangerous ocean basin on Earth, so imagine the squalls and storms she must have met, the enormous waves, magnitudes bigger than the boat itself. She may have crossed paths with migrating whales, tangled lines of sargasm seaweed, and the silent pulse of bioluminescent plankton lighted her path at night. And through it all, this little unmanned sailboat, only one and a half meters long, held its course. The solar panels kept her systems alive, the keel kept her balanced, and the ocean currents carried her onward. When the wind shifted, she adapted. When rain lashed down, she endured. When waves crashed over her bow, she surfaced again, a resilient explorer on a vast and unpredictable sea. Upon landing, Yakata not only set a record for a new country reached by the Miniboat Program, Wow Palau, but it was also confirmed that the voyage is the farthest GPS tracked linear distance of a mini boat ever recorded, and that's 5,362 nautical miles start to finish. As her new friends in Palau open the cargo hold and decide what to do next, we hope she continues to live up to her name. May Yakina Never Sink. To find out the rest of the story with Yakana Never Sink, please visit our website, educationalpassages.org. You have been listening to the Educational Passages Podcast. Educational Passages is a nonprofit organization. Please consider making a donation to help us continue our work bringing people together to learn more about the ocean. To donate, head over to educationalpassages.org slash support. If you're enjoying this program, please consider subscribing to the podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, or from wherever you download your podcasts. Thanks for listening.