Monday, September 01, 2003

This is kind of odd and intriguing:

Back in 1992, a violent storm tossed 20 containers of rubber duckies off the back of a cargo ship halfway between China and Seattle, and they were quickly presumed lost at sea. Instead, it appears the castaways embarked on an epic 11-year swim across three oceans and half the globe. Somehow, they stayed afloat through all magnitude of wind and wave, weathering several winters likely frozen in an arctic ice floe and enduring so many days of exposure their once bright yellow skin has been bleached white as bone.

And now their voyage may have brought them to the East Coast.

Remnants of the lost armada of bath toys, which also includes frogs, beavers and turtles — nearly 29,000 in all — are thought to be streaming down the New England seaboard right now. Although there are no confirmed sightings in the Atlantic yet, oceanographers who have documented the movement of flotsam and ice from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic Ocean are confident some of the ducks ended up over here. A breakaway flotilla of ducks is expected to make landfall in Britain soon as well.
Read all about it

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