Monday Silliness Alert!
Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the story, with bibliography, here. Another article published in 1999 not only includes the Friendly Floaties but also the origin of the OSCUR computer simulation - the Chinese message in the bottle and the Nike shoes that washed up on the beaches of Washington state and Oregon - here.
They shouldn't have put down the duckies
One summer I had a large group of kids practice writing a "friendly letter." We put those letters into wine bottles with return stamped postcards and had them dropped in various places in Long Island Sound by a fisherman who fishes 100+ miles out. All of the children received replys to their bottle messages within 4-6 months from places along the east coast ... all except this one sweet little girl. She was the most quiet in the group, the kind of kid who was never in trouble, and to me, most deserving of a reply, of any kid in the group. We talked about never giving up hope and ocean currents and dreaming of where her bottle might be. A year and a half later, my little friend found me and showed me a large envelope with a return address from Spain. Her bottle was found on a beach in El Rompido, Spain. I was able to immediately communicate with the gal who found the bottle message by email. The local papers picked up on the story and a very kind person donated a computer and internet service to the young student whose note traveled 3,400 miles so she could write to her new found friend across the pond.
This is a great summer activity for kids ...making your own message in a bottle. Be sure to launch it in the right spot with help from Greenpeace’s [argh!] Trash Vortex predictor. [If you are prone to epilepsy ... I suggest you not open this link!] And I couldn't find a east coast predictor.
Any beachcomber who finds one of the ducks or their kin will be able to claim a $100 reward from the toys' American distributor, The First Years Inc.It's a little known fact that this bath toy catastrophe caused that huge offshore earthquake off Indonesia a few years ago.