News Photo by Darby Hinkley Stockbridge InvenTeam students Jason Gruber, Macy Cipta, Alayna Adkins, and Kaden Carpenter stand with their research vessel before boarding the Lady Michigan earlier this season.

ALPENA — Stockbridge High School students visited Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in late May to deploy a research vessel from the back of the Lady Michigan glass-bottom boat.

“This is an autonomous sailboat,” said Alayna Adkins, a member of the Stockbridge InvenTeam. “We put it in the lake, and it just floats wherever it feels like it, and we have a water sensor and an air sensor, so it tracks all that. And it sends reports every 20 minutes to a link that I have on my phone, so we get to keep track of where it is.”

She said it’ll be out on the water until it comes up on the land and someone else picks it up and sends it back out.

“This is actually the second time it’s been launched,” she added. “We have a solar panel that will power our battery. It powers all our systems, our camera, our sensors. Then, our camera takes pictures every hour.”

Adkins is joined by InvenTeam members Jason Gruber, Macy Cipta and Kaden Carpenter.

“This is a class that we have out of our Stockbridge Special Projects Lab,” Adkins said. “So, technically, it’s an elective, but we’re doing things all the way from mini-cube satellites to this to aquaponic systems.”

“We also do a lot of aerospace and mechanical engineering,” Gruber said. “We have a whole bunch of tools and machines in the class, like laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC machines … We did some rocket projects and launched some rockets. High-altitude balloons. A lot of opportunities.”

“This is part of a worldwide project called Educational Passages,” said instructor Bob Richards. “So there are many boats that have been launched in the Atlantic Ocean in the gulf current, so schools on the East Coast started launching them and they’d end up in Great Britain or Ireland or France or Norway or Portugal, places like that.”

He said then students over there would get ahold of them, fix them up, and send them back out.

“There are some messages in here, from our students, to whoever recovers this, so they’ll read the contact information, make sure everything’s all set, put their own message in, relaunch it, then send it back,” Richards said. “There are multiple mini-boats out in the Atlantic Ocean right now. There are also some in the Pacific Ocean. This is the second time we’ve launched in Lake Huron. There have only been three launches in the Great Lakes, and two of them are from our school in Lake Huron.”

He said the time-lapse photography will hopefully allow the students to compile a video about the project, and the GPS information and water temperature sensors will help conduct scientific research.

“It’s a legacy project,” Richards added. “Alayna’s brother launched our first one before COVID.”

“I think it’s just pretty incredible that we’re able to do this, because not a lot of other schools get this opportunity,” said Cipta.

“The opportunities we get in this class are amazing,” Gruber said. “We’re just high schoolers and we get to do all these cool projects that college students work on, and it’s really introducing us to fields and careers that we can pursue in the future.”

“I like being a part of the project because it has to do with water, and I want to go into marine biology, so I’m really grateful for it,” said Carpenter.

“We couldn’t do it without the help of the Sanctuary here,” Richards said of Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary.