ADVENTURES inspired by a toy pirate ship that crossed the Atlantic are continuing with the launch of another Playmobil boat near to where the last one disappeared.
Brothers Ollie, 11, and Harry Ferguson, eight, from Aberdeenshire, made headlines when their toy ship travelled more than 3700 miles to reach the Caribbean after it was launched around 100 miles off the coast of Mauritania in West Africa in 2017.
The toy ship, called Adventure, was fitted with a tracker to pinpoint its location and has not been heard of since it was last recorded around 30 miles off Barbados in May 2019. However, a family in Trinidad with three young boys who had heard about the ship’s journey were inspired to continue the adventure by launching another boat.
They contacted the Ferguson family, who sent them a spare Playmobil ship they had and chatted with them over video
calls to explain how to modify the boat and make it fit to face the open sea.
MacNeill Ferguson, father of the two boys, said: “We set up video conferencing during lockdown and Ollie and Harry shared their engineering experience from the first boat with the Lewis family.
“We sent a second Playmobil ship [the same model] out to the Lewis family who then rebuilt Adventure2 in exactly the same way that we had our first version.”
Keith Lewis, father of Jax, seven, Kai, 10, and Fynn, three, works offshore and launched Adventure2 from the offshore support vessel Normand Installer around 74 miles north of Georgetown, Guyana, late on Wednesday. It is fitted with a tracker donated by the Caribbean Oceanography Aquaculture and Subsea Technology Foundation of which Lewis is a co-founder and director.
The boat also carries a message asking anyone who finds it to take a photo, contact the families and launch the vessel back into the sea. It is expected that currents will carry Adventure2 towards Trinidad and then on into the Caribbean Sea and she may then be caught up by the Gulf Stream and could possibly float back across the Atlantic towards the UK.
The boat’s journey can be tracked online at www.track-adventure.squarespace.com.
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