BoatBanter.com - 20 bucks for a faded duck

"Capt. Mooron" wrote in message ...
Better study your global currents...... anything floating down from the
Northwest Passage will meet the Gulf Stream just North of Sable Island and
be sent express to the Azores.

CM

From the CSM:

– Theirs is an epic tale of resilience and pluck, a seafarer's
yarn of high-seas adventure that has seen them brave some of the
world's wildest waters in their 11-year odyssey from the Pacific Ocean
toward landfall in Europe.
They have bobbed through storms that would have wrecked larger
vessels, to drift deliberately down the Bering Strait. They have
patiently borne a four-year spell trapped in Arctic ice packs, to
float freely into the Atlantic.

And now, buoyed perhaps by the prospect of an end to their pelagic
paddling, a flotilla of yellow bathtub rubber ducks, lost at sea when
they fell off a container ship in the North Pacific in 1992, is about
to wash up on Europe's western shores, according to an oceanographer
who has been tracking them for years.

More of the much-traveled toys are thought to be heading down the
Eastern Seaboard of the United States, where their arrival would offer
new data on ocean currents and wind patterns. And the US company that
made the ducks is offering $100 in savings bonds to anyone who finds
one.

Nobody has actually seen one of these ducks in the Atlantic yet, says
Curt Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer and the international dean of
beachcombers, who has put out a global call for sightings. But their
presence there "is a prediction based on the drifts of thousands of
other objects in my files," he says.

The plastic ducks were part of a consignment of 29,000 bathtub toys,
including beavers, turtles, and frogs, that ended up in the Pacific
when a container ship en route from China to the United States lost
some of its deck cargo in heavy seas.

An Alaskan landing

A number of the critters ended up on the beaches of Alaska, but from
those latitudes there is only one way out of the Pacific - through the
Bering Strait, past towering icebergs and the curious gaze of
walruses, around the northern coast of Greenland, and into the
Atlantic.

Some marine experts, including Capt. Charles Moore, founder of the
Algalita Marine Research Foundation in California, doubt there is
anything of the wandering waterfowl left to be found after 11 years.
And Captain Moore knows a thing or two about the subject: He describes
himself as having "dedicated his time and resources to understanding
and remediating the ocean 's plastic load."

"I think it's a bit of a fraud to suggest they are going to find ducks
in a whole duck shape," he says. More likely, he adds, the flock has
broken up into fragments. "If anyone finds a whole duck, it will be
very brittle," he predicts. "They may have to glue it together to
claim their reward."

But if the ducks - sold by The First Years, of Avon, Mass. - are as
sturdy as their friends the beavers, that may not be the case. Last
weekend, at a beachcombers' fair in Sitka, Alaska, Mr. Ebbesmeyer said
a boy showed him a sun-bleached beaver he had found nearby just the
other week.

"It was quite pliable, just faded," says Ebbesmeyer, who lives in
Seattle. "The amazing thing about these toys is that they are very
hardy."

Computer models of ocean currents and wind directions developed by a
friend of Ebbesmeyer's, Jim Ingraham, accurately predicted the arrival
of the ducks off the Washington State coast in 1995, after they had
been round the Pacific's circular current three times, in a 45,000
mile journey.

And they were not the only pieces of plastic flotsam around. The
Pacific gyre, a huge circular current "is like a toilet that never
flushes," says Moore, who has run a number of scientific expeditions
to two particularly polluted giant eddies he calls the "garbage
patches."

In those areas, he astonished the scientific community by finding six
pounds of plastic for every pound of plankton. Broken down into
smaller and smaller particles, "it is insinuating itself into the
bottom of the food chain," he worries.

Larger pieces are probably eaten by albatross and other birds, he
says: of 28,000 pieces of plastic he analyzed in the Eastern Garbage
Patch, only 83 fragments were tan-colored. The rest had probably been
snapped up - mistaken for shrimp, he says.

And since plastic is a sponge for pollutants such as PCBs and other
chemicals which are estrogenic, Moore worries, "we are changing the
sex of the ocean and its creatures," feminizing them.

Pairs of female seagulls have been found nesting together on the
California coast, he points out, wondering whether this might not have
something to do with the plastic in their diet.

Clues for science

Those plastic ducks that avoided becoming a polar bear's breakfast, or
being crushed by icebergs, could tell scientists unexpected things
about the ocean, depending on where they eventually wash up, says
Ebbesmeyer.

And their story is helpful in educating lay people, adds Peter
Killworth, who designs models at Southampton University's
Oceanographic Centre in England. "Many people don't realize that the
oceans move, that what happens here depends on what happened there,"
he says. "The ducks are a good lesson in how the environment works in
a global way."

En route, the ducks may well have bumped into other equally unlikely
denizens of the deep, many of them also spilled from the estimated
10,000 cargo containers that go overboard each year. "It's hard to
believe what's floating out there," says Ebbesmeyer, who has tracked
Nike trainers, Lego building bricks, hockey gloves, umbrella handles,
and even a 50-foot-long US Air Force booster rocket.

This spring, a time of unusual southwesterly winds in the Pacific,
West Coast beachcombers have found booty that appears to have been in
the sea for decades, such as a plastic ball decorated with 40-year-old
cartoon characters, and Japanese glass fishing- net buoys that have
not been used for half a century.

"I run a flotsam headquarters" collating informal reports from 1,000
beachcombers around the world, Ebbesmeyer says. And while people in
the Pacific Northwest know to look out for what he calls "the most
wanted animals," the rest of the world doesn't.

The First Years has received a dozen or so calls from people claiming
to have found one of its disappeared ducks, "but they have all been
the wrong kind of duck, just things kids have lost on the beach," says
company spokeswoman Laura Tomasetti.

"There are so many species of plastic duck out there," sighs
Ebbesmeyer, still hoping that a genuine sighting somewhere on the west
coast of Ireland, or perhaps in Scandinavia, will confirm his
predictions.

"It's a reasonable theory, and like all theories it needs some data,"
he says. "You can learn a lot from a duck on a beach."

Capt. American

BTW welcome back mooron

"Capt.American" wrote in message
om...
| Hey Boobsie, Keep your eyes peeled for rubber ducks! The will be faded
| white with the words " Your First Years" on the front. Ill give you 20
| bucks each if you find any. Thousands should start to wash ashore in
| the NE any day now. They been around the world, lost off Seattle~
| crossed the pacific,thru the bering strait, around the artic circle,
| crossed the atlantic and now headed your way.
|
|
| Capt. American