A tiny unmanned marine research vessel launched by Cape Fear Community College students last June has made a big splash in Ireland, where it was discovered by a father and son last Sunday, just off the coast of Galway.

It is the first time that a “drifter” boat set afloat in the Atlantic by CFCC students to measure winds and currents has been recovered, Jacqui Degan, an instructor in the college’s Marine Technology Department, said Thursday. The boat, named Marlin Spikin’ Miller, bobbed across about 6,000 miles of ocean between its launch location on the U.S. Southeast coast and a rocky island on the central Irish coast.

Twice a day on every day of its eight-month journey, the Marlin Spikin’ Miller has pinged its location, allowing marine technology students and faculty members to track the drifter. It washed onto the island Jan. 29 and was recovered last Sunday by Graham Roberts and his son Keith, said CFCC spokeswoman Sonya Johnson.

“Our Marine Tech staff knew that it had landed (via its transmitter) but needed to contact someone to retrieve it. The Roberts' business, Connemara Smokehouse (they smoke fish), is the closest business where the boat had landed and transmitted its location. Jacqui found them through the Internet,” Johnson said in an email Thursday.

Degan said that the 5-foot boat will soon make the rounds of area schools with the Roberts family as a show-and-tell exhibit, and local schoolchildren plan to write letters to place inside the boat’s hull. Marlin Spikin’ Miller will then be relaunched at sea by a research vessel belonging to the Galway Marine Institute.

While there is no telling where the boat will go next, Degan said, but if currents and winds carry it far enough south, it could conceivably reach the Northern Equatorial current, which moves east to west. Favorable conditions could bring the drifter back towards the southeastern U.S. coast, still pinging its twice-daily location.

The transmitter battery could last another year, according to Degan, who said also that the Roberts reported the little boat in remarkably good condition, with everything intact except its mast.

Degan uses the data captured from the Marlin Spikin’ Miller and previous drifters in her oceanography class.

While CFCC has been deploying drifters since 2009, this is the first time that CFCC students have built the research vessel. A collaboration between the marine tech program and the college’s boat manufacturing program produced the Marlin Spikin’ Miller and its twin boat, which was lost very soon after launch last April. New boats - copies of Marlin Spikin' Miller and possibly slightly different models - will emerge from the class, Degan said.

“John Olsen, lead instructor in the boat manufacturing program, has made this part of his program. Students use the same skills making a small vessel as they would making a large-scale vessel,” Degan said.