The students are from Rye Junior High School. They launched their boat from a harbor in Massachusetts in October 2020. The onboard GPS tracker worked for a time and then didn't, for a time.

The students began work on the project in 2018, as part of an initiative supported by Educational Passages, a nonprofit that aims to connect students to the ocean. Delays associated with the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus meant that the boat assembly kit didn't arrive until 2020. Then, after students had built the boat and were ready to finish it off by decorating it, they had to attend school online. Science teacher Sheila Adams encouraged the students to send in artwork, and then those art works were scanned and printed and then made into a collage on the deck of the 5.5-foot boat.

By the time the boat was ready, another class of students had come through and they got the chance to select the color of paint for the bottom of the boat. Thus, the number of students involved was rather large.

The Woods Hole, Mass.-based Sea Education Association offered to launch the students' boat, named the Rye Riptides, along with another miniboat named Sojourner's Truth from Northampton, Mass., built by students at JFK Middle School there. The Sea Education Association transported both miniboats aboard a much larger boat, the SSV Corwith Cramer, to Florida and then, on Oct. 25, 2020, sent both boats into the Gulf Stream.

The GPS tracker reported only intermittently because the seas, during hurricane season, were rough. However, the GPS chimed in on Jan. 30, 2022, with a location of a small island near Dyrnes, Norway, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The island, named Smøla, is uninhabited.

The New Hampshire students posted online, asking for help recovering their boat. Karel Nuncic (left), a sixth-grader in Norway, and his family, who can see Smøla from their house, heard about the plea and rowed out to find the boat. They discovered that the hull, keel, and mast were no longer attached but the cargo hatch, with messages and gifts inside, was intact.

After he and his family removed the barnacles and otherwise cleaned up the boat, young Karel took the boat to his school, and he and his classmates presented the boat to a national TV crew. The students have since connected online.