Scotland ho! for mini-ship

NJ kids’ sailboat travels 3,300 miles

It really is a small world after all — just ask the Falconer family, who found a miniature sailboat in Scotland carrying messages and mementos from students in New Jersey.

The tiny vessel made the 3,300 mile journey across the Atlantic with its hull and correspondence still intact, a miracle by any mariner’s standards.

It was found this month by the Falconers along a rocky shoreline near Dunrossness, on the east coast of the Shetland Islands.

The discovery came eight months after the boat was launched off the coast of Delaware in December 2016, according to the Magnus News Agency.

The family had been taking a stroll when 10-year-old John spotted the 5-foot-long SS Beard down a 30-foot embankment.

“At first, it just looked like a plastic container or a buoy, but then, when I looked at it properly, it looked like a boat,” the boy recalled. “And the only reason I thought that was because I could see the sail on it. It was exciting [to find the boat] but also at the same time confusing because I really didn’t know what to do with it at first.”

John’s father, David Falconer, 47, climbed down the rocks and discovered it was, in fact, a white fiberglass boat.

“My son noticed there was a lock-type screw lid on the top of the hull and we opened it up and it was full of bits and pieces from this school in America,” David said. “There was a real baseball, a globe, a stuffed whale toy and a bag of sweeties, which weren’t edible anymore.”

The students who launched the boat are from MorristownBeard School in northern Jersey and had been patiently waiting to hear what had become of it. They lost contact with its GPS tracker earlier this year and feared the worst.

David told the Magnus News Agency that his father, David Falconer Sr., 70, was able to track down an e-mail address for teacher Lisa Swanson, who oversaw the boat project, and give her the good news.

“She was over the moon we’d found the boat, and we even e-mailed her a few photos of us with it,” the younger David recalled.

MAKING WAVES: Jessica and John Falconer (above) of Scotland found the SS Beard, packed with goodies (right) and launched last winter by these Jersey kids (left).