Some Exciting Recoveries!

By Tom Harten, PolarTREC Educator and teacher at CHESPAX/Calvert County Public Schools, Frederick, Maryland

As a teacher with the CHESPAX environmental education program of the Calvert

County Public Schools, I’ve had the opportunity to become involved in a variety of

interesting projects. We have students raising little diamondback terrapins (brackish

water turtles) for a raise and release program. We operate an Osprey Webcam,

designed to provide students a window into the lives of these magnificent birds of prey.

Over the past three years, we have been able to connect some sixth-grade students

and community members with Float Your Boat (FYB), a project designed to raise

awareness about climate change and its impact on our planet. The students and

community members decorate small wooden boats that are placed on the sea ice

alongside a GPS beacon that transmits its location along with environmental data to

scientists from the  International Arctic Buoy Programme. The scientists were

conducting this research anyway and had the brilliant idea to bring students along for

the ride via the wooden boats decorated in their classrooms.

The boats from our 2023 cohort were delivered to the North Pole on September 11,

2023 by the German Icebreaker, Polarstern. For a few months after delivery, the boats

rested on the ice in the frozen darkness of the polar winter. Eventually, the sun

returned, and the ice began to melt and move. While the boats and the beacon likely

stayed together for a period of time, eventually they separated, and the boats drifted on

the open ocean. The map below depicts the track that the buoy traveled from the north

Pole and southward.

One of the exciting aspects of the project is that each boat is uniquely identified with a serial number that is branded into the bottom of the boat along with the web address for the Float Your Boat organization.  If a boat is recovered, and the finder reports it, we can pinpoint the retrieval location for any found boats.

We have had four boat recoveries from that initial deployment in 2023.  It’s always exciting to get a message from the FYB team that one of our boats has been recovered.   We check the spreadsheet and then track down the student whose boat was identifed. 

While we did the project with several different sixth grade classes and participants in the Calvert County Public Schools Science and Engineering Expo, I found it interesting that three of the boats came from the same class.   We had an initial recovery of a boat decorated at our science expo from the northwest corner of Iceland Capturing Imagination in Hornstrandir Nature Reserve.  Shortly after this first recovery, another boat was recovered in northern Iceland.  This boat was decorated by Kenzie a student from Mr. Kelsey’s science class at Northern Middle School in Owings. Reported from Norðurþing, Northern Iceland.  Kenzie shared, “When I found out my boat was found in Iceland I was glad to see that the boat was able to show some data and help with  the project.”

Our third and fourth recoveries occurred fairly recently and within about a week of each other, albeit in different countries!  Saniyah’s boat was found on the west coast of Iceland by a vacationing family from Corsica, Corsican Family Finds Maryland Boat in Snaefellsjökull.  Saniyah reacted, “When I heard that someone found my boat, I was shocked and surprise because I didn’t think my boat was going to be found!”.

Brystol’s boat was found in southern Norway, Boat Found on Southern End of Norway.

We are excited to see when and where our next boats will be recovered!  Thank you, Float Your Boat, for including us on the journey!