by Skye Moody
McLeod, too, was hauling in Nike flotsam along the Oregon coast. Oregon’s news media picked up the story, and soon the folks in the Queen Charlottes were talking to McLeod down in Cannon Beach. While the story made national news, the beachcombers were busy collecting the shoes. McLeod’s apartment soon was packed to the gills with Nikes, which he carefully cleaned, dried, and debarnacled, even removing their laces, cleaning them, and returning them to the shoes they came from. His place resembled a shoe factory production line, all the shoes now clean and wearable. Only problem was, he couldn’t make a lot of matches. What good is one Nike shoe without its mate? Unfortunately, although they were laced, matching shoes hadn’t been tied together; when they fell into the sea, the pairs parted ways. Assuming other beachcombers had made similar discoveries, McLeod contacted fellow scavengers along the Pacific Coast through a remarkably swift word-of-mouth communication. The result? Dozens more Nikes in Oregon, the majority being left-footed.
Of the approximately eighty thousand Nikes released into the ocean, McLeod and other beachcombers collected about thirteen hundred shoes from the waves. But how to identify them as from the Hansa spill? And then someone noticed the shoes bore serial numbers. Smart, Nike.
At first declining to discuss the shoe flotsam, the chagrined Nike Corporation, after considerable wrangling and diplomatic exchanges, admitted that, indeed, their athletic shoes had accidentally fallen off the Hansa Carrier into the North Pacific, and verified this with the serial numbers. These were no black market items; these were genuine Nikes. Owners of the Hansa Carrier suffered similar embarrassment as maritime insurance companies investigated the accident to determine liability. Had the carrier secured the containers where they were stacked just aft of the fo’c’sle? Had the proper equipment been used to secure them?
For Ingraham and Ebbesmeyer, the Nike spill represented a great opportunity. This accidental flotsam, and the recovery of approximately thirteen hundred single shoes, dropped into their laps data they could not have planned better: The date, time, percentage of recovered shoes, and exact location of the spill would allow them to test and calibrate their ocean currents model. Using OSCURS, Ingraham and Ebbesmeyer aimed to determine the drift pattern of the shoes from the time they hit the water until they washed up on North American beaches. OSCURS suggested most of the shoes making landfall would wash up near the northern tip of Vancouver Island, central British Columbia coast, and Washington State beaches approximately 249 days after they went overboard. The first reports of shoes washing up had come from Vancouver Island and Washington beaches about 220 days following the spill. Now this is important: A large number of shoes had beached on the Queen Charlotte Islands northwest of Vancouver Island. A second large number washed up farther south, at Oregon beaches. Why had some Nikes headed into northbound currents while others traveled on a southbound current? The answer: The slight toe curvature of left- and right-footed shoes caused the right-footed shoes to tack northeastward into the Alaska Current, passing the Queen Charlottes along the way, where many beached. Meanwhile, the left-footed Nikes tacked snugly into the southeast-bound California Current, and as it passed Oregon, were caught on an incoming tide.
Avias galore plucked from the Oregon coast.
As time passed, Steve McLeod didn’t know what to do with all those Nikes taking over his apartment. He put the word out: Let’s get together and match shoes, size for size, left to right. He organized a Nike shoe swap. In one day the swap paired up twelve hundred right and left shoes of the same size, left matched to right by serial number, and the pair went to whomever fit the shoe. McLeod even visited the Queen Charlottes and found more shoe matches there.
Postscript: In the summer of 1992, more Nikes washed up, this time at the northern tip of the island of Hawaii. The theory is that these shoes made a nearly complete round trip on the circling currents. In 1999 another spill tossed fifty thousand pairs of Nike cross-trainers into the ocean. OSCURS correctly predicted their washing up along the North American West Coast in 2003.
An athletic shoe can stay afloat for about ten years and is still wearable after three years in the ocean. Nike flotsam shoe matching is a continuing sport along North America’s West Coast.
Post-postscript: On January 9, 2003, the West Coast’s most prolific flotsamist, John Anderson, found a left-footed, blue and white Nike EZW men’s basketball shoe on the beach at Queets, Washington. A week later Anderson found an identical shoe, also at Queets. The only difference between the two Nikes: One was a size 8½ and the other a size 10½. Anderson noted that the shoes were made in Indonesia and he noted the serial numbers. He consulted with Ebbesmeyer, who deciphered the shoes’ codes. According to the serial numbers, Nike had placed its order for the athletic shoes on October 10, 2002, and the order was filled in Indonesia on December 12, 2002. Nike confirmed that during a storm on December 15, 2002, three containers of their shoes were accidentally jettisoned overboard forty miles off Cape Mendocino, California, while the vessel caught heavy seas en route to port in Tacoma, Washington. (A total of ten containers had fallen overboard.)
But what of the remaining seven containers that fell into the sea? John Anderson may have the answer, for along with the Nikes on the Queets beach, Anderson found some metal cans, still sealed and light enough to float.
“Turns out they were chow mein noodles,” John told me. “And they were fresh. Sure, I ate some. They were good, too.”
Good thing, too, because the Nikes I saw from that spill were hella-bad ugly.
Not Only Nikes
Each year about 100 million cargo containers cross Earth’s oceans. Manufacturers of everything from Barbie dolls to BMWs hire shippers to navigate ocean waters between their factories and their retailers. Container vessels carrying an average of forty-five hundred shipping containers ply the Pacific every day, each container being a size that fits snugly on one railroad car or one semi-truck. Most of these cargoes reach port safely, but as any importer can attest, disasters happen. About one thousand cargo vessels each year accidentally dump some or all of their cargo into the sea, for an average of approximately ten thousand cargo containers per year falling into the oceans.
I met a woman in a movie queue who had just purchased a BMW from a European factory. Just the day before, she said, a BMW representative telephoned to say that her custom-outfitted BMW had fallen overboard into the Atlantic Ocean. “It was a nice car,” she told me, “really, really nice.”
“So what happens now,” I asked.
“Oh, they’ll replace it. The guy said, with all the stuff, just as I’d ordered it.” She shrugged good-naturedly. “Hey, things happen.”
Cargo container spills cause hazards at sea. On January 11, 2000, the British FV Solway Harvester, a scallop trawler, went down in the Irish Sea, claiming the lives of seven crew members. Plastic vats filled with mayonnaise were found near where the trawler sank, according to the Scottish Scallop Association. Investigators strongly suspect the trawler collided with a spilled cargo container.
An unfortunate importer in 1993 lost seventeen thousand hockey gloves, shin guards, and chest protectors to the Pacific Ocean in a cargo jettison. The gloves floated, traveling faster when the glove’s fingers pointed up, acting as a sail.
Another importer lost a load of Legos. On February 13, 1997, as the Tokio Express sailed off Land’s End, England, a rogue wave tossed the cargo vessel, jettisoning sixty-two containers overboard, including a container full of Legos from Denmark. That one container carried 4,756,940 miniature plastic toys, in a hundred different shapes, many of them kits for making boats. The Legos, originally bound for Connecticut, included, among other items, 28,700 yellow life rafts, 418,000 red or blue divers’ flippers, 97,500 gray scuba tanks, 132,000 gray and yellow diver legs, 4,200 black octopuses, 33,941 black and green dragons, and 54,400 pieces of green sea grass.
Curt Ebbesmeyer, by now tracking cargo spills with all the glee of a mischievous schoolboy, performed a “sophisticated test” involvi
ng a bucket of saltwater, concluding that fifty-three types of the Legos floated, while the remaining forty-seven types probably sank. By Ebbesmeyer’s calculation, as many as 3,178,407 Lego pieces could have gone adrift. That is, if the container actually broke apart at sea. That some Legos escaped the container was confirmed when some Lego dragons and Lego sea grass washed up in Cornwall, England. It takes about fourteen months to travel around the Atlantic gyre, the clockwise loop that the joining currents form from Cornwall down to Spain, then across to Florida into the strong Gulf Stream and up along the Carolinas. The Danish flotsam may already be washing up along North America’s eastern coastline. And because Lego is such a well-made product, its durability means the little life rafts and dragons, etc., could stay afloat for decades. OSCURS predicts Legos will wash up on Alaska beaches in 2012, on Washington State beaches in 2020.
The Rubber Duck Lowdown
In 1992 a factory in China shipped out 28,800 rubber beavers, turtles, frogs, and ducks, destined for North America for a company called The First Years, in Avon, Massachusetts, where they would be sold as Floatees and placed in the bathtubs of girls and boys and even grown-ups of the nostalgic sort. The rubber bathtub toys were stuffed into plastic and cardboard packaging, each containing a yellow duck, a green frog, a blue rubber turtle, and a red beaver. The plastic was glued to cardboard backing and placed into a carton with thousands of others just like it, and the carton was loaded into a cargo container. The container was loaded onto a ship.
As the ship approached the international date line, it encountered a violent storm. The ship tossed and rolled. Everything inside the cargo containers shifted. And then containers broke from their bindings and fell into the storm-tossed sea. When the container with the toys hit the choppy waves, it broke apart, spilling the packaged playthings into the sea. Within a day or so, the glue holding the cardboard backing to the plastic housing dissolved, releasing the four rubber toys from each package into the ocean.
The first reports of rubber toy sightings came late that year. On November 16, 1992, at least six of the rubber toys washed ashore just south of Sitka, Alaska. A few days later, twenty more toys were plucked off a beach just north of the first beachings. Then, between November 1992 and August 1993, about four hundred more of the bathtub toys washed up on beaches between Cordova, Alaska, and the southeastern Gulf of Alaska beaches of Coronation Island.
OSCURS got on the case. The computer program simulated a drift model of the toys. Consulting the cargo vessel’s logbook, oceanographers Ingraham and Ebbesmeyer pinpointed the release time and location. The U.S. Navy’s Numerical Oceanography Center provided wind speed and direction information. Using a satellite tracking system, they constructed a simulation model, which ultimately suggested that over the next two years, many of the toys most likely would drift westward along the Alaska coastline to eventually enter the Bering Sea. From there, the only way out would take the floating rubber toys past icebergs to the northern coast of Greenland, and from there, into the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1995, ducks and turtles were sighted off the Washington coast, evidence that some of the bathtub toys traveled south. In 2003, a duck was found on the coast of Maine and a frog turned up in Scotland.
As much as insurance companies mourn the accidental jettisoning of cargo into the oceans, Jim Ingraham, forever the optimist, calls them “spills of opportunity.” Both Ingraham and Ebbesmeyer view the cargo spills as boons in their effort to improve mathematical models of surface current drifts, especially those affected by seasonal variations or weather anomalies like El Niño and La Niña.
Year of the Flotsam
They come around once every ten years or so, the latest being spring 2003. They are big flotsam events—massive amounts of stuff washing ashore. Curt Ebbesmeyer called spring 2003 the “flotsam event of the century.” In fact, he used the phrase as a banner headline for his July-October 2003 Beachcombers’ Alert! newsletter. And indeed, it was a historic season for flotsam on North America’s West Coast. A persistent southwesterly wind pattern combined with unusually prolific spillages at sea brought untold treasures to West Coast beachcombers. That’s the year I plucked a fifty-year-old life jacket out of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and a Timex digital watch, still working, set, perhaps coincidentally, to Japan’s time zone, the digital date correct, allowing for the international date line. Timex wasn’t kidding when it claimed, “It takes a licking but it keeps on ticking.”
Ancient pottery vessel of mysterious origin. Blue ribbon winner at 2005 Beachcombers’ Fair, Ocean Shores, Washington.
Other beachcombers simply could not haul all their finds off the beaches, so many treasures washed up. Correspondence in bottles arrived in droves, many from Japanese schoolchildren who make a hobby of tossing bottles with messages into the sea. Glass fish-net floats dating from as far back as the 1950s washed up. Whole flotillas of floatables, including ancient pottery urns, those thirty-four thousand lost hockey gloves, Tommy Pickles cartoon heads, Lightning Bolt sandals, little Legos life rafts, plastic umbrella handles, Christmas-themed items lost in the Pacific in October 1998, even bottles of soy sauce, which might have spruced up John Anderson’s chow mein noodles. And Nikes galore.
Interestingly, that spring, Steve McLeod in Cannon Beach, Oregon, found twenty Lightning Bolt sandals and Brian Gisborne on Vancouver Island, in Canada, reported fifty Lightning Bolts. Left- or right-footed? Alas, no one recalls exact figures. Such is the fate of longtime flotsamists; once you understand the currents, once a lost cargo has been reported, its estimated date of landfall predicted, actually finding the cargo doesn’t hold the same rush the cargo cultist enjoys. As for the rubber ducks, by now their pretty yellow bodies have faded or even disintegrated from exposure to the elements, yet some may still be out there, bobbing across the waves, and, if OSCURS’s predictions hold, some now bob in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the British Isles.
As Ebbesmeyer says, “You can learn a lot from a duck on a beach.”
In the summer of 2005, following a particularly ferocious North Pacific storm, I gathered an abundance of fascinating flotsam. Among the treasures were a human femur bone, a Japanese flip-flop, a barnacle-coated sake bottle—its label intact, no message or sake inside—and a barnacle-encrusted blue plastic football. I wonder about their marine adventures. Had they entered into and swirled around the North Pacific’s Great Garbage Patch? How long had they swirled before catching a quirky outbound wave? If only flotsam could talk.
What exactly is gyrating around in the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and Indian Ocean subtropical gyres? Not only plastic. Whole cargo loads of detritus—that is, consumer items—are swirling around in these great whorls, just waiting for a serendipitous current to snick them off and drive them into a coastal current and then toward shore. Who knows? Another lost cargo container of chow mein noodles from China might eventually break apart, sending noodles to Nome—and everyone knows the Inuit like Chinese food—or they might veer off farther south, to wash up in the Philippines, and by then they’ll need a lot of hot sauce. Or the noodles could make another journey around the ocean currents before reentering the Great Garbage Patch, there to languish well past their expiration date. The Chinese rubber frogs, ducks, beavers, and turtles that stranded on an Alaska beach certainly proved a windfall to the village’s children. Flotsamists constantly wonder when the gyres will twitch off their most coveted desires.
V. LIFE’S A BEACH
The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach—waiting for a gift from the sea.
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH (1906-2001)
In the early 1900s most flotsam washing up on the world’s beaches was still organic in nature, and a high percentage of flotsam had been jettisoned from shipwrecks along storm-worn coastlines. In January 1900, London newspapers reported that the British steamer Malin Head, under the command of a Captain McKee, was sailing from Ardressan to St. John, New Brunswi
ck, when the crew picked a piece of wood flotsam out of the ocean. It bore the letters “Merrim.” The British steamer Merrimac, which had set out from Quebec on October 27, 1899, under the command of Captain Robert Shallis, bound for Belfast, Ireland, had disappeared after leaving Canada and was never heard from again. The piece of wood flotsam found by the Malin Head’s crew was believed to have come from one of the Merrimac’s lifeboats, and was the first sign anyone reported of the missing vessel.
On October 2, 1906, following a violent hurricane that wiped out forty-four lighthouses on the U.S. Gulf Coast, a report from Pensacola, Florida, told of the destruction of Fort McRae, its batteries and guns being swept away by the violent ocean tides. Even as “Queer flotsam and jetsam” from the sea washed inland as far as the coastline railroad tracks, five men were said to be “chained in the army hospital, raving maniacs,” victims of the hurricane. Meanwhile, the coastline was dotted with fishermen’s cottages, which, along with their occupants, were “as if by one stroke” washed out to sea to join other flotsam set adrift by the hurricane.
On January 21, 1910, the Dutch mail steamer Prins Willem II sailed from Amsterdam for West Indian ports, ultimately bound for New York. The crew and passengers numbered fifty-two. It disappeared at sea and no word of it came until March 16, when a life buoy and a boat’s oar, both bearing the vessel’s name, were plucked off the ocean’s surface near Belle-Ile on the coast of France. Shortly afterward, the ship’s propeller and a name board washed up on a nearby island.
On October 2, 1927, Captain G. A. Patterson, commanding the Nelson Line steamer Buffalo Bridge, noted wreckage floating in the ocean about forty-eight miles off Cuba’s coastline at Guantanamo. Patterson believed the wreckage was from an airplane flown by Georgia flier Robert Redfern, who was attempting to fly from Brunswick, Georgia, to Brazil, but whose airplane had disappeared over the ocean. Besides Patterson’s flotsam find, other flotsam believed to have come from Redfern’s airplane was found floating in the ocean, while in northeastern Brazil, citizens reported sighting an airplane off their coastline. The flotsam offered the only evidence that Redfern’s airplane had gone down over water. As forensic evidence, flotsam now included objects falling from the sky.
