FOUND A DUCK?
If you have stumbled across a duck or "other bath toy" while beachcombing, e-mail a photo to Ebbesmeyer at curtisebbesmeyer@msn.com
I am sure some of you FREEPERS can come up with some "creative" rubber ducks!!!
Posted on 07/19/2003 8:51:02 AM PDT by fight_truth_decay
Wanted: One fugitive rubber ducky, slightly battered by ocean currents and Arctic ice, made of hard plastic faded from yellow to white. Written across its chest: "The First Years."
Reward: $100.
A container filled with 29,000 plastic bath toys tumbled off a ship in early 1992 during a stormy voyage from China to the United States, and fell into the world's biggest bathtub.
Some of the toys headed toward Southeast Asia, others toward the Arctic. By 2000, some of them should have arrived in the Atlantic, but the wayward toys have yet to be documented landing on East Coast beaches.
Now Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired Seattle oceanographer and beachcomber who has been tracking the toys since thousands of them washed up on the beaches of Sitka, Alaska, is urging Mainers who may have found one to contact him.
In addition to ducks, there are blue turtles that should still be blue, even after their 11 1/2-year journey, and green frogs that should still be green. There are also red beavers that have now faded to white. But it's the duckies Ebbesmeyer yearns for the most.
The company that made the toys, The First Years, has offered up a $100 reward to the first person who sends a picture of their duck to Ebbesmeyer.
By talking to reporters in coastal communities, "I'm trying to put out the 'Most Wanted Duck' posters," Ebbesmeyer said.
Ebbesmeyer uses his knowledge of ocean currents, a computer model of currents in the North Pacific developed by a friend at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, and an international network of hundreds of beachcombers to track the flotsam of the world's oceans.
He keeps in touch with what's washing ashore through a Web site, www.beachcombers.org, and a quarterly newsletter called "Beachcombers' Alert." His work has been featured in publications ranging from Smithsonian magazine to People.
"I'm an ocean detective," he said. "Beachcombers tell me about something (they've found), and I work backward in time to see where it came from. What's the story behind it?"
Over the years people have told him of discoveries ranging from the fanciful to the downright weird. It turns out there are a lot of sneakers floating around out there, along with hockey gloves and Japanese glass fishing floats.
Among the odder finds are a voodoo head, a squirt gun in the shape of a toilet, and a human jawbone traced back to its original owner, an Alaskan fisherman. Most recently, a 3-foot safe washed up in Texas.
"Now who would think a safe could float?" pondered Ebbesmeyer, who is now trying to figure out if the safe was part of a robbery.
Imagine the "ick" factor that comes with walking onto a beach and finding thousands of Rug Rat doll heads.
Or even worse, a real human head.
Ebbesmeyer has worked on murder investigations and can describe in discomfiting detail exactly why heads are always the first thing to pop off a floating corpse.
On Thursday, when Ebbesmeyer was a guest on an Australian radio show called the "Flotsam Hour," a caller described finding a jump seat from a jet plane on a local beach.
"You name it, it's out there," Ebbesmeyer said. "That's why I maintain that the surface of the ocean is as mysterious as the sea floor."
How does all this trash end up in the ocean? Ebbesmeyer says every year there are 100 million containers shipped overseas. Of those, 10,000 fall overboard.
"Ever see the Clint Eastwood movie 'Hang 'em High?' " Ebbesmeyer said. "The container industry is 'stack 'em high.' It makes for tippy ships."
A roll of 35 degrees during a storm can send a container full of shoes or plastic doo-dads into the sea.
After the ducks and other toys were tossed into the ocean, Ebbesmeyer did a computer simulation and found, unexpectedly, that they were moving twice as fast as water. It took them just three years to move around the North Pacific, whereas water normally takes six years.
The toys took two paths out of the North Pacific. One group went down through Southeast Asia to the Indian Ocean, traveling 15 miles a day.
"The cold ducks went up through Bering Strait and got trapped on the ice," Ebbesmeyer said. "It takes about five years to get over to Iceland, and then another year to get down to you."
Ebbesmeyer knows the ducks haven't degraded yet because he has put them in his freezer, hit them with a hammer, and drilled holes into them, and they remain in one piece and still float.
Some of the "cold ducks" should have popped out of the Arctic ice by 1999. Others will keep going around the Arctic for the next 20 to 30 years.
"There's a gyre up there that goes around once every 15 years," Ebbesmeyer said. "It will store things for a century. The ocean's really good at keeping things. She's very tidy and she kind of swirls them around like little dust bunnies. She collects them and she just lets them go once in a while."
Some of the cold ducks and the high-speed ducks that traveled through warmer climes met up again in Britain in 2000, having covered 20,000 miles. Ebbesmeyer thinks there surely should be some washing up on the United States' eastern shoreline by now, too.
But so far, there have been no confirmed sightings. All that's appeared in his mailbox are a few "bogus ducks" - the blue ones with numbers and sunglasses that occasionally escape from duck-race fund-raisers.
Now, a $100 reward from the duck's maker is providing a little incentive.
Darlene Hollywood, spokesperson for The First Years, said the company is happy that its bath toys have contributed to Ebbesmeyer's scientific work on ocean currents, "but also I think it's a testament to the quality of our products."
"Certainly if they can handle the Bering Strait and a trip halfway around the world, they can hold up in a bathtub," she said.
But there is also a dark side to the duckies.
Duck bath toys and other plastic trash that ends up in the ocean is not biodegradable. When a captain friend of Ebbesmeyer's conducted a plankton tow in the North Pacific, he found six times more plastic than plankton.
"In 10,000 years, pieces of that duck will still be around," Ebbesmeyer said. "It will be duck dust, and that will become part of the food chain. That's the really nasty part."
FOUND A DUCK?
If you have stumbled across a duck or "other bath toy" while beachcombing, e-mail a photo to Ebbesmeyer at curtisebbesmeyer@msn.com
I am sure some of you FREEPERS can come up with some "creative" rubber ducks!!!
"We're on a mission from God..."
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