Small boat with hidden messages washes up 27 years after launch, Wisconsin woman says
A couple in Wisconsin stumbled upon the “shipwreck” of a small boat last week — a discovery nearly 30 years in the making.
Lynn BeBeau and her husband Mike were out in Wisconsin admiring the fall foliage and taking in the sunset when they found a path that led to a remote Apostle Islands beach on the shore of Lake Superior, Michigan Live reported.
It was there that they happened upon a small wooden boat painted red, white and blue, Lynn wrote in a Facebook post.
“I noticed a little colored piece of wood buried in the sand about 20 feet from the water,” Mike told KBJR. “I thought it might have been a net buoy or a net float that had broken loose from a commercial fisherman’s boat or something but when I dug it out and then kind of washed it off, I was really surprised and I thought, ‘This is really cool.’”
Lynn posted photos of the “shipwreck” to Facebook, along with images of a handwritten message on the bottom of the boat.
It read: “I am traveling to the ocean. Please put me back in the water. Will you send information on your whereabouts to, Lakewood School, Room 116 & 118 5207 N. Tischer Duluth, MN 53304.”
Lynn did as the message requested, and tossed the boat back in the water before contacting Lakewood Elementary School in Duluth, Minnesota, roughly 100 miles west of the beach, Michigan Live reported.
After talking with school administrators, she learned that the boat had started its journey 27 years earlier after a teacher read the award-winning children’s book “Paddle-to-the-Sea” to her class, Lynn wrote.
The 1941 book written by Holling C. Holling follows the journey of Paddle-to-the-Sea, a wooden figurine in a small canoe carved by a young boy, which travels through the Great Lakes and ultimately reaches the Atlantic Ocean. The boy writes a similar message on the boat before setting it sail.
Teachers Bonnie Fritch and Brenda Schell each launched a wooden boat during a 1993 field trip to Brighton Beach just north of Duluth with their second-grade classes, KBJR reported.
“Brenda had a friend that made the boats and we had our class paint them, and at the end of the year we would take a trip around Duluth to go to Enger Tower and all that and we went to Brighton Beach to let the boats go with our class,” Fritch told KBJR.
It’s not the first time the boat has been found.
Fritch said someone stumbled upon the red, white and blue ship farther up shore about a year after it launched, and “put a second coat of varnish on the boat and relaunched it,” she told Michigan Live. “I thought we wouldn’t hear any more about it. Amazing it is still out there.”
The BeBeaus said they hope their discovery will encourage people to venture off the beaten path.
“We like to just find remote places and just see what we discover and this was by far the coolest discovery by far,” Lynn told KBJR.
