News that these splendid isles are about to face an invasion of rubber ducks this glorious summer has me reaching for my long stick with a hook on the end.Especially as there's a reward of £50 for each one.
It could be a wonderful urban myth but I want to believe that in 1992 a container full of 29,000 plastic ducks, frogs and turtles were washed overboard from a freighter in the Pacific just off the coast of China - now for the story to be true we have to imagine that somehow the container broke open when it fell off the container ship, or that maybe all 29,000 plastic ducks, frogs and turtles had been lashed to the deck on an individual basis - still, lets gloss over the facts...
19,000 of the bobbing bathroom buddies bobbed their way south and turned up on beaches in Indonesia and Australia but the rest of them decided to swim north and in the last 15 years oceanographers have been tracking their whereabouts in a unique study of how the worlds ocean currents work - I can't think of a better way to spend government money than by following plastic ducks, frogs and turtles on a 15 year journey, what a thing to put on your CV.
Some of them have turned up on the Western Coast of the USA but some are known to have traveled way up north and are now frozen into pack ice making their way across the arctic at the top of the world, the theory goes that sometime this year they will find themselves thawing out in the North Atlantic and washing up somewhere on the south west coasts of our island.
And these dumb oceanographers who have spent all of their working lives following rubber ducks will give you £50 per duck if you find one.
I'm up for it, anyone else ?
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