The Friendly Floaties World Tour!

[CptStern]

lol:

On January 10, a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world?s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores.

The toys, or ?Friendly Floatees?, as they became known, made their first landfall in mid November of 1992, when the counter-clockwise Subpolar Gyre started dumping the yellow rubber ducks (and blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs) on Alaskan shores. It took the ducks about three years to drift full circle on the Gyre ? scientists calculate they drift 50% faster than the water in the current itself. They turned up all over the Pacific: Japan, Hawaii, North America and Australia.

As Ebbesmeyer predicted, some ducks escaped the Gyre to flow North through the Bering Strait into the Arctic. Between 1995 and 2000, they slowly drift eastward, frozen in the arctic ice, at a rate of 1 mile per day. In the new millennium, the ducks started reaching the North Atlantic, being sighted from the shores of Maine to Massachusetts. In 2001, the ducks reached the site where the Titanic sank. In 2003, the plastic toys reached the shores of the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland. This article in the Daily Mail predicted their arrival on the shores of southwestern England in 2007.

If you spot one of these plastic toys on a beach, its colors probably faded by now, with the imprint ?The Early Years?, then you?ve found one member of the plastic armada that set sail over 15 years ago. At some point, the scientific team that tracked their progress offered $100 apiece for the ducks ? provided you could tell them when and where you?d found them. The offer was valid only from July through to December 2003, and only for Friendly Floatees found in New England, Canada or Iceland. However, friendly Floatees have become so famous that they can fetch up to $1,000 at auction.

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/275-the-friendly-floatees-world-tour/

awww stories of floating ducks/garbage warms the heart

 

[CyberPitz]

I let out a slight "aww" after reading the article.

 

[Raziaar]

Hahaha.

 

[highlander]

I let out a slight "aww" after reading the article.

This.

 

[CptStern]

I let out a slight "aww" after reading the article.

that's because ...

"stories of floating garbage warms the heart"

 

[Tollbooth Willie]

Best story I have ever heard in my entire pathetic existence. That's just ****ing awesome.

 

[<RJMC>]

I for one welcome our new yellow floating overlords

 

[Solaris]

I for one welcome our new yellow floating overlords

I love you.

 

[L3N!N]

We do this in our city; we throw duckies off the pier with numbers on them, and the first to reach the beach wins. It's called the Duck-A-Thon and has high stakes.

This seems much more epic though. Although this isn't competition...or is it?

 

[MJ12]

 

[Raziaar]

Nice.... nice.


That rubber ducky actually floats upside down.

 

[MJ12]

I actually have that one. It came in a little bag with the Death Certificate. It's pretty awesome.