UW-Madison student makes plea on social media to find research boat lost on Lake Michigan
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MILWAUKEE (WISN) — Monday, while running a survey for data collection off the shore of Lions Den Gorge Nature Preserve in Grafton, Chelsea Volpano lost connection to her research boat.
“We do these repeat surveys, and we take the boat out and do kind of a grid pattern,” said Volpano, a Geoscience PhD student at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “I was about three-quarters of the way through that survey, and I had sent the boat out to the lake to do a line. And something must have shorted out with the controller or the transmitter.”
Volpano said the boat kept going straight farther into Lake Michigan, and gusty offshore winds helped to push it even farther.
Now, she’s asking for the community’s help to find the 2 feet by 3 feet orange research boat. A post about the missing boat on Facebook has gotten more than 2 thousand shares.
“I just had a pilot from Racine reach out to say that he was going to fly along the coast and try to check out some of the areas that are likely to show up. The Coast Guard did a drift simulation for me to show where it’s likely to end up,” Volpano said.
The Coast Guard’s simulation shows the boat is most likely still close to where it was lost, just one to three miles south of Lions Den, which would place it along the shoreline in southern Ozaukee or northern Milwaukee counties.
“It’s pretty bright orange little catamaran. So it’s about two feet wide, three feet long, and it has sort of a sensor on top of it. So it should look pretty out of place on the beach, at least,” Volpano said.
The data collection is for a project on bluff erosion. Monday’s collection was special since it was so late in the season. Without finding the boat, Volpano says they will lose data from Monday and won’t be able to run any more surveys.
“My Ph.D. is looking at how bluffs erode and then how that sediment moves into the offshore. And that kind of controls, you know, how bluffs erode in the future when there’s a storm that comes in the shape of the beach, kind of dictates how much that bluff is susceptible to the storm,” Volpano said.
The findings will help to understand erosion across the Great Lakes and hopefully provide needed information for policymakers in the future.
If you happen to find the lost boat, Volpano asks that you send her an email at chelsea.volpano@wisc.edu. She’s also active on her posts about the missing boat on X, formarly known as Twitter, and Facebook.
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