Friendly Floatees
Besides in our bathtubs rubber ducks are also floating in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and are known as the Friendly Floatees. During a storm in 1992 twelve containers one of which contained over 28,500 yellow rubber ducks, red beavers, green frogs and blue turtles have been washed overboard a container ship.
The floating toys that were manufactured in China for The First Years Inc. were washed overboard in the North Pacific Ocean and after 10 months made their first landfall along the Alaskan coast. The unusual sea guests soon attracted attention of retired American oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer who soon evaluated the importance of the yellow rubber ducks (and off course also beavers, frogs and turtles) for monitoring and determining the ocean currents.
Curtis Ebbesmeyer and his colleague James Ingraham took advantage of the incident with Friendly Floatees and developed a model (basing also on their prior work and knowledge) to predict the further landfalls of the floating toys. The Friendly Floatees turned up all over the Pacific Ocean in coasts of North America, Hawaii, Japan and Australia, while some floated through the Bering Strait and trapped in the Arctic. Moving slowly across the Arctic the Floatees reached North Atlantic and reached the shores of New England, Canada and Iceland in 2004, while many more of this toys are predicted to landfall on the southwestern shores of United Kingdom.
The Friendly Floatees became worldwide famous, while the toys themselves have become highly desirable by collectors reaching prices up to $1,000.