Educational Passages Podcast
Educational Passages Podcast
The Gift That Keeps On Giving
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:
This episode tells the remarkable, ongoing story of a student-built miniboat that has connected classrooms, countries, and generations since its first launch in 2016. What began as a high school research project in Connecticut became a global journey across the Atlantic, linking students in the U.S., Ireland, the UK, the Canary Islands, the Bahamas, and then North Carolina through shared discovery, letters, data, and friendship. Relaunched again and again by new students each time, Lancer carries gifts in her cargo hold and lessons in her wake, proving that learning doesn’t end at the shoreline. This episode reflects on how one small boat became a “gift that keeps on giving” — inspiring curiosity, community, and connection year after year — and invites listeners to help keep her legacy sailing into the future.
Visit https://educationalpassages.org/support to make your gift and help keep the Lancer's story alive (https://educationalpassages.org/boats/lancer/)
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. Just this week on Christmas Eve, we saw the Crimson Cyclone land in Morocco after 655 days at sea. Coincidentally, this mini boat was actually first set to sea on Christmas Eve back in 2023. As we celebrate this new landing, we await word from the finders who will open the boat with treasures from Morristown Baird students in New Jersey that were put inside the hold before it was launched. This reminds me of how our mini boats are gifts. And as mini boats are relaunched with students adding new things each time, they are gifts that keep on giving. One mini boat has brought gifts to five countries so far, the Lancer. It all started back in 2016. High school student Caitlin Dow in Waterford, Connecticut, is an oceanography class. Her assignment is to conduct research. She investigates many things and comes up with the idea to study wind and currents in the ocean. She'll need to design something that can capture these things. So she and her fellow students, along with nearby fourth graders as well, build a drifter and a mini boat, think sails up and sails down. It starts to become more than a science project as the whole community gets involved. They named their mini boat the Lancer for School Spirit. And on a spring day in May 2016, the Lancer and the Drifter were launched into the vast North Atlantic from the deck of the Woodshole Oceanographic Institution's research vessel, the Neil Armstrong. It was during the ship's science verification cruise a truly special voyage. Picture it, wind rippling the water, gulls overhead, research happening all around. Then a tiny boat not more than six feet long and a drifter with sails just under the surface are lowered into the sea. Both are powered only by wind and currents. The science crew sets them off in hopes they will travel across thousands of miles of open ocean, but any distance will do, as that is all part of the research and learning. The ocean carries both mini boat and drifter eastward, over the continental shelf, across the New England Canyons and Seamounts, and finally catching the Gulf Stream. Teachers and students in Connecticut watched its progress online, tracking every latitude and longitude ping which came in multiple times a day. Weeks passed and the paths started to separate. The drifter, traveling much slower than the boat, left the Gulf Stream and headed into the center of the Atlantic. It drifted about halfway across before the GPS stopped transmitting. The mini boat, however, stayed on the ocean highway. It crosses the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and keeps on sailing. After four months at sea, it approaches Ireland. Caitlin did some more research, this time investigating where exactly the boat might land to try and get it recovered before it crashed on the rocky shore. She could calculate the boat's speed and use nearby weather models and data to show how the winds and currents were moving. She contacts pubs up and down the coast, hoping to reach as many possible people to enlist help. The Lancer gets closer and closer to land. On September 17th, after a week or two of stalling offshore as if to build suspense, the Lancer finally made her approach towards Galway. With the sun rising, she was a few kilometers off a rather sparsely populated island just west of Connemara. One of Caitlin's messages is read by the owner of a pub in Drim, who tells her sister, Nisa, Nisa has an eight-year-old daughter, Maeve. Maeve and her family tracked the boat for a couple of days and were shocked to find the GPS eventually report from their backyard. Nisa shared later with us we couldn't believe it when the GPS tracker showed the sailboat literally in front of a little island that we gaze at every day from our living room window. Maeve and her dad walked down to the rocky shoreline to investigate. There upon the rock she was. Nisa explained later that it was a little weather beaten, having sailed through 3,000 miles of storms and high seas. Maeve was beside herself opening the boat to see what surprises from across the wild Atlantic were hidden below. Wow, a teddy, an octopus, pencils, a t-shirt, Yukon memorabilia, and the best thing, a memory stick laden with treasure from the elementary students. The family talks about where the boat came from and all the connections shared. They have family in Massachusetts, which is right next to Lancer's home in Connecticut. Their family is full of fishermen and boatmakers too. Her grandfather and uncles even own Galway Hookers, very traditional wooden boats found in Galway. Boats, ocean, the power of connection. This voyage turned out to be so much more than data and distance, it became about the people. Maeve brought the boat and all the gifts inside to her school. Caitlin and Maeve, separated by ten years of age, connect overseas. They encourage their classmates to do the same. Friendships formed that would never have existed without the Lancer. The conversations continue, and Caitlin starts a fundraising campaign to raise money for a trip. She travels all the way to Ireland to meet Maeve in person. Together they explore the Marine Institute, seek Galway Hooker boats in person, meet the local Sea Scouts, and sing and dance. The Lancer is repaired the following year with a new sail and paint and new items are added to the cargo hold. She's relaunched in spring 2017 from the Marine Institute's research vessel, the Celtic Explorer. Back into the North Atlantic she goes, launched about halfway between Ireland and Newfoundland. The tracking continues as the GPS pings and reports back to the webpage online, but now there are hundreds more following her journey. After traveling another 6,500 kilometers by July, we saw she was headed towards the south coast of England. More outreach was done, but the GPS went silent when she was within a half day's sail from Plymouth Harbor. Oh no, did she crash on the rocks? Then, all of a sudden on the morning of August 4th, she rewarded again, this time from a field of anchored boats at the mouth of River Yelms near the small port of Newton Ferries. Two patrons at a local pub, yes, another pub connection, heard about the project, as they were discussing a local newspaper article about it at the time. So they went to the harbor and recovered it. Activity was pretty quiet for a couple years as the boat remained on a shelf at a local school. Excitement had built in the early 2020, but due to the pandemic, it stayed on the shelf. Then in 2021, new connections were made with folks at the National Marine Aquarium and the Ocean Conservation Trust. They put together a program called Project OCN. After meeting hundreds of students around the UK who visited the aquarium and learned about the mini boat, ocean science, and climate change, the Lancer was upgraded by local students, adding air and water temperature sensors and even a camera on deck. The Lancer was shipped to the Canary Islands, where students there had decorated a new sail for it. It returned to the water once again, this time with new life thanks to the Institute of Oceanography's research vessel, the Angelus Elvarno, off the waters of Tenerife. People around the world, now in the thousands, were tracking her voyage once again. With new sensor data, they could also take part in studying what the ocean was telling them, temperature changes, images of marine life, and patterns tied to ocean currents. Caitlin's school research project became a gift of research and connection to the world. The camera captured sunsets, moonshots, when the sail came off, and even a little bird who kept using the deck for a rest just north of Turks and Cagos. Then, on Earth Day in 2023, Lancer completed another remarkable crossing, this time westward across the Atlantic, reaching its fifth country in the Bahamas. A new cohort of students joined the crew and received their gifts in the cargo hold. They connected virtually with the students in the US, Ireland, the UK, and the Canary Islands. They repainted the vessel and added their own gifts for the next finder. But how would they relaunch it? If they send it back out near the Bahamas, surely it would just come right back, right? Well, serendipitously it was none other than Caitlin Dow herself who came to the rescue as she was going to visit the Bahamas for work as she was now in the Coast Guard. Caitlin was reunited with the Lancer after seven years, completing a learning circle she never could have imagined when she started. A research project that became a gift to the world. But that wasn't the end for Lancer. It was sent back to Connecticut where a new set of students at Waterford High School prepared her for another voyage and sent her off, this time on the University of Rhode Island's research vessel, the Endeavour. They even launched a new higher tech drifter, a maker buoy drifter that had the same sensors as the mini boat at the same time, a little homage to the first launch back in 2016. Students made predictions and the world watched it set off. But it did not go as it did before. This time she went south. Both the mini boat and drifter landed in North Carolina. The boat was brought to Water's Edge Village School in Corolla, where young students received all of its gifts. Treasures from students all over, hundreds of messages, eight years of data, a very special sale decorated with endemic species from all of the countries it has been so far, and the power of new possibilities. The Lancer's story is so rich, showing us that every voyage teaches something new, regardless of the distance it traveled. It teaches us that each new find is an opportunity for connection, for community. It's a chance to send your message to the world and offer gifts that will form lifelong friendships. Imagine yourself as one of the people from this story. Imagine being Caitlin, a high school student launching a research project, then years later reuniting with the same tiny boat after it's crossed an entire ocean. Imagine being Maeve, eight years old, finding a small sailboat right in your backyard, carrying it into your classroom, and realizing that something built by students across the Atlantic has found its way to you. Imagine opening a cargo hold and discovering a letter written by someone your age from another country, another culture, connected by nothing more than the curiosity and the sea. Imagine tuning into a Zoom call in 2023 and realizing that a project launched back in 2016 is still teaching, still connecting, still making waves. Imagine being a student who took a field trip to the local aquarium, seeing the boat, and then tracking it online all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. All of these moments began the same way with a gift. A little white boat built piece by piece by students, powered by wind, curiosity, and community. The gift became Lancer, and Lancer became a gift that keeps on giving, crossing an ocean, connecting classrooms, sparking curiosity, and continuing to teach long after her first voyage. Year after year, voyage after voyage, she has carried lessons, letters, data, and possibility from one generation of students to the next. It will help relaunch Lancer for her sixth voyage in 2026, ensuring her journey and her impact continues. Students in North Carolina are ready. Classrooms across at least five countries are watching. Thank you for being a part of this journey and for helping keep Lancer and the gifts she represents sailing forward. 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. 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