The Friendly Floatees

Back in early 1992, a container ship leaving Hong Kong accidentally spilled its contents in the Pacific Ocean: almost 29,000 plastic bath toys including many classic yellow rubber-duckies. [France]

Ten months after the incident the first Floatees began to wash up along the Alaskan coast. The first discovery consisted of ten toys found by a beachcomber near Sitka, Alaska on 16 November 1992, about 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from their starting point. Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham contacted beachcombers, coastal workers, and local residents to locate hundreds of the beached Floatees over a 530 mile (850 km) shoreline. Another beachcomber discovered twenty of the toys on 28 November, and in total 400 were found along the eastern coast of the Gulf of Alaska in the period up to August 1993. This represented a 1.4% recovery rate. The landfalls were logged in Ingraham’s computer model OSCUR (Ocean Surface Currents Simulation), which uses measurements of air pressure from 1967 onwards to calculate the direction of and speed of wind across the oceans, and the consequent surface currents. Ingraham’s model was built to help fisheries but it is also used to predict flotsam movements or the likely locations of those lost at sea.

Many of these ducks landed on Pacific beaches in Japan, Australia and North America, but a few of “the friendly floatees” caught the northern ocean currents and took “the VERY long trek through the Arctic Sea.” Some of these started landing on English beaches in 2007.

Strange Maps has the detailed story and a map of the ducks’ journies.