The "Crimson Tide" shortly after it was pulled out of the English Channel by a fisherman
A Guernsey fisherman was amazed when he came across unusual flotsam in the English Channel. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a miniature sailboat only five feet tall. It was easy to find out where it came from: Not only was a declaration printed on board about the origin and the purpose of the project in three languages - the sender, students from Morristown, New Jersey on the east coast of the United States, also had one Class photo of yourself stuck on deck.
The "Crimson Tide", the name of the mini-boat, had been sent on its journey unmanned by the students. Since it had no controls whatsoever, it was more or less helplessly exposed to waves and storms - for months. Hard weather conditions will probably have cost the nutshell its mast at some point. In any case, she arrived in Europe without a rig, but the hull was covered with algae, barnacles and mussels.
Despite the one year and three month long odyssey across the Atlantic, the "Crimson Tide" was never lost. The journey of the rather primitively sailed offshore dwarf could be followed using a GPS tracker. In the end, he covered a whopping 3,000 nautical miles.
The zigzag course of the "Crimson Tide" (red line). the other two lines are the courses of two other unmanned sailing boats
The "Crimson Tide" is just one of several miniature sailboats that are currently wandering the Atlantic. The whole thing is a kind of school competition. The idea for this came from the American Dick Baldwin, who reports on his website Educational Passages about 28 unmanned boats that students have built themselves since 2008 and then launched.
One of the vehicles landed on the European coast before. It was started from Cape Hatteras by the students of the Old Town Elementary School and made it all the way to the Irish coast. It's now hanging in a pub there. Probably the place where you would go first after crossing the Atlantic on a real boat.
