Acclaimed toy boat gets ready to set sail on its next Adventure
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Turriff brothers Ollie and Harry Ferguson, whose sailing boat's adventures continue to gain global attention are once again setting forth on the high seas.
Their first toy sailing ship Adventure travelled across both the North Sea and the Atlantic ocean and in October 2019 they earned a Guinness World Record for the longest distance travelled at sea by a toy boat.
With the original Adventure’s tracker shutting down off the coast of Barbados, undaunted, they created Adventure 2 which headed out to sea on the Normand Installer, an offshore support vessel for her maiden voyage in September last year.
What followed was a cat and mouse chase across the Caribbean with Adventure 2 firmly living up to it name.
Launched 60 miles north of Guyana on the same track as the original Adverture, the Advernture 2 sailed for 4000km westwards across the Caribbean Sea surviving two hurricanes and an undersea earthquake during its four month odyssey.
Nearing Honduras in early December winds forced the vessel onto the shore in a remote lagoon in the Honduran jungle, and thus began a search to find her.
Thanks to the efforts of locals from Brus Lagoona, the boat was eventually located and handed in to officials in the Honduran Navy.
Following some repair work, the boat has been taken to Guanaja, an island visited by Columbus in 1502 where it is set to be launched on its latest journey which may see it head towards Cuba and possibly even onwards toward Florida given the right tidal conditions.
Dad Mac Ferguson explained: “We are almost back on our adventure.
“Our thanks go to everyone who has been involved in the efforts to get Adventure 2 back in the water again.
"Particular thanks of course go to the Coast Foundation for their initial assistance in getting Adventure 2 on the go last year and we can't wait to see where the next leg will take our boat."
Updates on the ship can be found via www.facebook.com/tdajp/
Several years ago Ollie and Harry’s parents created a list of achievable adventures for the two youngsters, which in turn quickly grew to 500.
This has included everything from having a bath outdoors, constructing a giant catapult, sending a LEGO figure into space and mummifying a fish through to hunting for meteorites, eating Surstomming (fermented herring) and even setting up their own independent country, the Kingdom of Ce.
But it was the quest to launch a toy boat at sea that earned them worldwide acclaim.
In May 2017 the boys, with some parental, help used a Playmobil pirate ship which they named Adventure to undertake on of the tasks on their list.
After making it watertight, the boat was launched near Peterhead containing a message in a bottle with contact details for the boys.
It duly made its way across the North Sea and was found by a couple on the north-west coast of Jutland, near Hanstholm, after a 390-mile crossing.
After a relaunch it turned up in a tree on the Swedish coastline, where the finder also contacted the boys and carried out small repairs before relaunching the boat on its travels.
It was then spotted off the coast of southern Norway by a conservation vessel, where crew member Haakon Braathu Haaverstad of the National Conservation Authority found it near Vesteroy.
After the story was picked up by the Norwegian press, national papers in the UK and even international yachting media, a new offer of an adventure beyond Scandinavia was offered.
Captain Clas Jagdum, master of the internationally renowned Norwegian three-masted sailing ship the Christian Radich, which is a regular participant in the Tall Ships races and appeared on BBC TV in the 1970s in The Ondein Line, offered to take the vessel on its next voyage – to the Cape Verde islands.
The boat was launched off the coast of Mauritania and spent many weeks travelling westwards across the Atlantic, almost making landfall on the northern coast area of South America before tidal currents drove it towards Bardados where the story of Adventure 2 began.
