Friendly Floatees spill

Friendly 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.

[citation needed] A 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,[1] destined for Tacoma, Washington.

One of these containers held 28,800 Floatees,[2][3] a child's bath toy which came in a number of forms: red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow ducks.

Seattle oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham, who were working on an ocean surface current model, began to track their progress.

Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham contacted beachcombers, coastal workers, and local residents to locate hundreds of the beached Floatees over a 850 kilometres (530 mi) shoreline.

In July 2007, a retired teacher found a plastic duck on the Devon coast, and British newspapers mistakenly announced that the Floatees had begun to arrive.

[4] But the day after breaking the story, the Western Morning News, the local Devon newspaper, reported that Dr. Simon Boxall of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton had examined the toy and determined that the duck was not in fact a Floatee.

[6] In 1997 Black Swan published That Awkward Age (Transworld 1997, ISBN 978-0552996716), a comedy written by Mary Selby, in which several of the ducks are found off the Isle of Lewis, one then being purchased at auction and treated as a metaphor for perseverance.