Duckies: one of high seas’ many terrors

Sunken treasure, it appears, is now passe, replaced by the much more convenient floating… Sunken treasure, it appears, is now passe, replaced by the much more convenient floating treasure. Thirty thousand Nike running shoes – which run a fistful of doubloons per pair – have been loosed upon the high seas, and they are accompanied by 29,000 bath toys from a separate shipment – including rubber duckies -manufactured under First Years Inc.

According to an Aug. 31 article in The Washington Post, First Years offered a $100 U.S. savings bond for every ducky found around Iceland or on the American or Canadian Atlantic coast.

Not just any ducky will do, though. The ducky must be a confirmed member of the washed-overboard cargo of a 1992 ship en route from China to Seattle.

That’s right: the reward is for rubber duckies that have migrated from Pacific to Atlantic. Moreover, according to oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham, the duckies probably took the route least traveled.

“Wind moves ice from the Bering Strait [between Russia and Alaska], over the North Pole, and down to eastern Greenland at about a mile a day,” Ebbesmeyer said.

Ice and, apparently, bath toys.

The duckies are only 94 years behind humans – Robert Peary’s 1909 expedition was the first recorded trip to the North Pole – and are substantially hardier than us, having made the voyage while frozen in floes of ice.

If plastic ducks are capable of such a feat, what might our prized computers, so villainized by films like “The Terminator” and “The Matrix,” prove capable of?

My computer, I can safely say, is capable of being hit with a tire iron by me. But rubber duckies, I can attest, are far more resilient in the face of bludgeoning.

Moreover, the toys, like other products washed to sea, tend to come in steel shipping containers. The containers often stay afloat, creating danger for unsuspecting boaters.

Beyond that, even when the duckies perish, their non-biodegradable, plastic corpses further pollute our oceans. I remember the first time I heard uproar about plastic six-pack rings killing dolphins. The rings seem downright harmless next to a Nike.

And the ducks are only a small part of the 10,000 cargo containers that fall off ships each year, a situation that has earned the ire of environmentalists, according to the Post article.

It comes as no surprise, then, that there is a bounty on the heads of these so-called “children’s toys.”

Yet perhaps the duckies, no matter how pernicious they are, get a bad rap. After all, they were washed overboard by a severe Pacific storm, whereas the rings were transported to sea quite intentionally, with other trash, in huge garbage barges. Rage about the shoes, if you must. Make the shipping companies clean up their steel containers.

But let the rubber duckies – and their frog, turtle and beaver friends, brought to you by the same company – swim free.

So find a weekend and make a trip to the beach. New England is probably the best ducky-hunting spot in the States. You might find a ducky, thus making up the cost of your trip and helping to save humankind for our children.

Me, I will be staying right here. My complexion – a ghostly pallor at its darkest – means a day in the sun leaves me burnt, if not molten. Moreover, I fear the terrors of the sea, such as the Portuguese man-of-war, which is a small, floating airbag with long, cuddly, death tentacles.

I would’ve liked to stand on that beach, but I learn from Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham that there are onions, to which I am fiercely allergic, floating unchecked throughout the sea.

The horror. The horror.

Marty Flaherty can be reached at xgrp@hotmail.com