Ten months after the incident, the first Floatees began to wash up along the Alaskan coast. They were already tracking various other spills of flotsam, including 61,000 Nike running shoes that had been lost overboard in 1990. The recovery rate of objects from the Pacific Ocean is typically around 2%, so rather than the 10 to 20 recoveries typically seen with a drift bottle release, the two scientists expected numbers closer to 600. The mass release of 28,800 objects into the ocean at one time offered significant advantages over the standard method of releasing 500–1000 drift bottles. Seattle oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham, who were working on an ocean surface current model, began to track their progress. Unlike many bath toys, Friendly Floatees have no holes in them so they do not take on water. Although each toy was mounted in a cardboard housing attached to a backing card, subsequent tests showed that the cardboard quickly degraded in sea water allowing the Floatees to escape. At some point, the container opened (possibly because it collided with other containers or the ship itself) and the Floatees were released. One of these containers held 28,800 Floatees, a child's bath toy which came in a number of forms: red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow ducks. On 10 January 1992, during a storm in the North Pacific Ocean close to the International Date Line, twelve 40-foot (12-m) intermodal containers were washed overboard. Oceanography Ī consignment of Friendly Floatee toys, manufactured in China for The First Years Inc., departed from Hong Kong on a container ship, the Evergreen Ever Laurel, destined for Tacoma, Washington. Eastern Seaboard as well as British and Irish shores, fifteen years later, in 2007. Others traveled over 27,000 kilometres (17,000 mi), floating over the site where the Titanic sank, and spent years frozen in Arctic ice before reaching the U.S. Some of the toys landed along Pacific Ocean shores, such as Hawaii. Ebbesmeyer studied the movements of a consignment of 28,800 Friendly Floatees-yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles, and green frogs-that were washed into the Pacific Ocean in 1992. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer with flotsam (including some Friendly Floatees) that he observes to monitor ocean currents.įriendly Floatees are plastic bath toys (including rubber ducks) marketed by The First Years and made famous by the work of Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who models ocean currents on the basis of flotsam movements.

Ten rubber duckies book