By Richard Ashmore

A family in Scotland were stunned when they discovered a small boat carrying messages from a US school which had managed to sail 3,300 miles across the Atlantic.

The Falconer family were taking a stroll near Dunrossness on the east coast of the Shetland Islands when 10-year-old John spotted something on the rocky shoreline.

John, his sister Jessica, 11, and their dad David, 47, and grandparents David Snr, 70, and Roseanne, also 70, had only walked about 200 yards from their parked car when they made the discovery.

Dad David scaled down 30-foot of rocks to get to the boat and managed to carry it back to the waiting family on Sunday August 6.

After looking inside a sealed compartment in the vessel they discovered it had been launched by the Morristown-Beard School in New Jersey, around 30 miles from New York.

The 6th graders, 11 and 12-year-old's, of the school had launched the five-foot-long S.S. Beard filled with mementoes in December 2016 off the coast of Delaware.

The small ship had been fitted with a GPS tracker which the children monitored on the internet. However, contact was lost with the S.S. Beard in February this year.

But now thanks to the Falconer's the children in New Jersey have learned their intrepid little ship survived the trans-Atlantic voyage, striking land some seven months later.

John said: "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. 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 I didn't know what to do with it at first.

"I've not been to America before but we will be going in October to Disney Land."

John said he would be excited to speak to the children at the American school once they were back from summer holidays.

John's dad David Falconer, said: "It was my son John who found the boat, he spied it down a bit along the shoreline. It is cliffy around there, maybe about 20 or 30 feet down to where it was.

"My parents were here visiting from Perth in Scotland, we'd just gone for a ramble basically for the day, maybe two or three miles along the coast.

"We came down from the car and maybe had only gone 200 yards when my son John said 'dad what's that?' and I said 'What's what?'

"John's got eyes like a hawk, he can see things nobody else can see normally. He said it looked like a boat and we could see a bit of stern and a bit of a sail.

"I actually thought it was one of these seismic survey boat markers that they use around here, they're kind of torpedo shaped."

David climbed down the rocks and sure enough it was the hull of a white fibreglass boat, around five-foot in length complete with mini sail. David picked up the vessel and brought it back up to dry land.

He said: "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.

"Basically, they lost contact with the tracker on the boat, and it was washed up on the east coast of Shetland 3,300 miles away.

"Our boat was still intact enough that there were things still inside. There was a real baseball, a globe, a stuffed whale toy and a bag of sweeties which weren't edible anymore.

"Inside a water-tight bag there were letters from the children at the school in America describing their lives and families and that kind of thing.

"The letters had got wet and my mum Roseanne, who is 70 years of age, sat painstakingly outside the house peeling each letter apart and drying them on the stone path.

"It was a lovely sunny day and for more than an hour she managed to get all these pages apart, and most of them are readable still."

David said his father, David Falconer Snr, managed to email a teacher at Morristown-Beard School and she has since been in contact.

He said: "She was over the moon we'd found the boat, and we even emailed her a few photos of us with it.

"She said as soon as the school gets back from holidays they'd be really excited to hear from my son's class."

Lisa Swanson is the teacher at Morristown-Beard who has overseen the boat project with the students.

She saidt: "I have reached out to a number of my students and they are elated. You need to know that we lost contact with the boat in early February when the battery in the GPS died.

"As a result, we were unable to track the boat's progress online and had to hope that we would receive a 'surprise email or phone call' someday if the boat was found.

"I am very excited that the boat has been found because it gives my students an opportunity to make a connection with students abroad.

"I teach geography and one thing are that my students examine is the essential question 'how does where you live affect how you live?'

"My students live 30 or so miles from New York City, a very congested and densely populated part of the United States, compare that to growing up and living in Shetland, what a difference.

"I recently emailed John's teacher about connecting our classrooms this year and possibly Skyping.

Lisa said the S.S. Beard was in fact the fifth boat of her kind, the first of which reached Guernsey in the Channel Islands, but was then launched again and landed in France.

The other vessels either did not make the crossing or contact has not been established with the finders yet.

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251055 GMT AUG 17