Waterford ― Waterford High School is going to sea. Again.

Michael O’Connor’s Early College Experience Marine Biology class has built a three-foot long sailboat named Lady Lance, the sister vessel to the 2016 sailboat which landed in Ireland after a four-month-long voyage.

When the Lady Lance is launched by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution just south of Martha’s Vineyard on Nov. 8, the original boat, “The Lancer”, will be set back in the water off the Canary Islands in an effort to return home.

After 8-year-old Méabh Ní Ghionnáin, a resident of Connemara, County Galway, Ireland, stumbled upon the Lancer in September of 2016, it was re-launched into the ocean and washed up in the United Kingdom. It was recovered by an elementary school, but between a lack of resources and then the COVID-19 pandemic, the boat was untouched until recently.

That’s when the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, England stepped in to help restore the boat with students and teachers and send it back across the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, with leftover funding from 2016 CT Sea grants, a Pfizer grant, and another from the Captain Planet Foundation, O’Connor said the high school was able to finance the nearly $4,000 Lady Lance.

In addition to the Lady Lance, which will be driven across the ocean by the wind, the project includes a drifter which uses underwater fabric sails to be propelled by ocean currents.

O’Connor normally has students complete individual projects over the course of a school year. That was the case with the Lancer, an individual project by Kaitlyn Dow, who has since graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy with a degree in naval design.

But with Lancer now set to re-launch in November, O’Connor decided to put the individual projects on hold and incorporated an “all hands on deck” approach to get “Lady Lance” in the water.

Sam San Juan, a senior in O’Connor’s class, said she’s excited about the project, even if she did not pick it herself.

“For this to actually be functioning and going across the Atlantic ocean, I mean that’s kind of crazy to think about,” San Juan said. “Especially because it can reach people in a whole other country and being able to connect like that.”

Dow and Ní Ghionnáin were eventually able to meet in Ireland last year, accompanied by O’Connor. He called the experience “eye opening” as they learned that the area in which “The Lancer” was found in speaks only in Irish, with English as a second language.

More recently, Dow and O’Connor met with Ní Ghionnáin via Zoom, along with the aquarium, the school that found the original boat as well as former Quaker Hill Elementary School teacher Martha Shoemaker and some of her former students who helped decorate the Lancer before it’s launch.

Included in that call as well was Nicole Kennedy’s current class of fourth graders who, like Shoemaker’s class, helped decorated the Lady Lance and fill it with notes.

Kennedy was teaching sixth grade in 2016, but moved to Quaker Hill when Shoemaker retired. She felt obliged to continue the tradition of participating in the project when contacted by O’Connor.

“I almost think of this as a legacy project as well,” Kennedy said. “If this is something we’re going to be doing several years in advance, I’d love to have some of my students be involved in Mike (O’Connor’s) class for years to come.”

Kennedy said she taught Dow in sixth grade, and now has the younger sibling of one of the original fourth graders in her current class. The Waterford native called it a “full circle” experience.

A learning opportunity

Kennedy’s fourth graders was divided into five groups on Tuesday morning and rotated around the room from station to station, learning about the project from the high school students.

“You don’t know a subject until you try to teach it,” O’Connor said of his students.

While one station had students painting the hull of the ship, another involved writing climate change messages on the sails of the drifter as the younger children learned about human impact on the planet.

Another station had students learn about water density in hot, cold, salt and fresh water, and how that impacts underwater currents. Another taught students the effects of wind on the currents using miniature plastic sailboats in a solution that could show the direction the water moved in. The fifth station had students write notes to put in the hull of the ship and paint the ship’s sail.

“This would’ve been the highlight,” senior Ally Puccio said at the thought of being a fourth grader participating in the project. “This would’ve been so exciting.”

Fourth-grader Owen Long said his favorite part of the experience was learning about the wind currents and he hopes to learn more about Ireland if “Lady Lance” reaches shore.

“Everybody’s helping us to learn and it’s cool that they brought all the stuff in,” Long said.

Kennedy said her class is also going to use data from the boat in the classroom while O’Connor said the data will enter into a global database that a number of organizations and universities can use for research.

The fourth-grade class also placed a project of their own, a book entitled “Wonderfully Made,” in the new boat. The book is about growing up in a bi-racial family in Waterford, and even has depictions of Quaker Hill as the book’s setting. Included too were self portraits students drew and poems they wrote, which will be sent on the voyage as an e-book.

“I always tease, you never know what these kids can be one day,” Kennedy said. “They could be the ones to solve the climate change issue.”

O’Connor said some students can be “jaded” by the time they are seniors in high school. and he liked the idea of teaching the wide-eyed younger children as a way to “rejuvenate” the older students.

Not for San Juan, however. She said she is excited about the project and what her future may hold after graduation.

“It’s definitely opening my eyes to new opportunities that I didn’t think were there,” she said.

k.arnold@theday.com