Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea & of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists & Fools Including the Author Who Went in Search of Them

What a fascinating story! The author takes you on his journey to track down those escaped rubber duckies. You'll learn about container shipping, ocean currents, geography, and human nature. A grand read.

I am reading Moby-Duck, by Donovan Hohn. I find it quite interesting and informative, especially on the topics of ecology and ocean currents. When I started making notes of pages that had bits of information and quotes I wanted to reference later, I did not expect the large volume of references I would find. About half the pages have something. One quote I especially like is, "Why do we like to walk on the beach?...all the cells inside our bodies realize they're close to their mom." This is from Curtis Ebbesmeyer, retired oceanographer, in Seattle, Washington. As an amateur beachcomber (I do it because I love it,) I was fascinated with Moby-Duck because there were explanations of the movement of flotsam and jetsam on the ocean waves and currents. I have never read any other account that explained how and why things drift to their landing places. In Moby-Duck I found there even is a publication about beachcombing--Beachcombers' Alert! published by Curtis Ebbesmeyer. Book review readers will likely know by now that the theme of Moby-Duck is an account of part of a shipment of plastic bath toys broken loose from their bindings and catapulted into the Pacific Ocean during a dramatic storm, January 10, 1992. They were in huge containers, 8 feet wide by 20 or 40 feet long. At least one container burst in the crash, the rubber toys spilled into the sea. The story tracks the routes of winds and ocean currents that move water and materials around in the oceans. Along with the bath toys, I read about shipments on other ships that break loose and crash into the deep--shoes, sneakers and sandals, computer monitors, things that float. "Ghost nets" were disturbing. They are high-seas drift nets, 15 miles long! Broken loose from fishermen, these nylon nets roll up into a huge ball, tangling animals, catching on coral reefs, killing anything in their paths. I learned about chemicals that break down from lost or discarded items floating in sea water, and what they can do to plants and sea creatures. I was disturbed to find that beach clean-up operations get grants from polluters like BP, Chevron, or Dow Chemical. These grants give a positive twist to the corporate reputations while nothing is done to stop the pollution they cause. Oddly enough, half way through the book, the bath toys were taken off the market, after they were found to have a high level of lead. On investigation, Hohn found that it is up to the manufacturers to make sure a toy is safe, the government agents find out about the problems later. The vast majority of toys found in US stores are made in China, in sweat shops. Shouldn't we have some suspicion about the quality of what we get from such sources? I have not finished reading the book yet. I'll keep reading it. It is like no other I have found. I don't expect a solution to the problem of pollution of the oceans, but an education is helpful.

What worlds lie within a rubber duck? To discover the answer read Donovan Hohn's, Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. I did and loved every word.Hohn takes us on several journeys, both interior and exterior, as he follows the trail of the bath toys, called Friendly Floatees, which plunged into the northern Pacific Ocean from a container ship one stormy night (or maybe day)in January of 1992 and floated away into the annals of history and myth. He stumbles on the story late one night while grading a paper for project he'd assigned his high school journalism class based on James Agee's concept, the archeology of the ordinary. Hohn writes, "If like Agee my students could learn to study a thing--any particular thing--`almost illimitably long,'...they too might begin to perceive `the cruel radiance of what is' rather than the narcotic shimmer of what isn't. Or so my hopeful thinking went."Prone to nighttime flights of imagination, intrigued by the quixotic rubber ducks that float from the Pacific Ocean, through the Arctic into and the Atlantic, Hohn pictures a flotilla of cheerful yellow duckies bobbing to the surface mid-Pacific,and fanning out as far as the eye can see. It is a charming image; he is hooked. After some research and phone call to the oceanographer who had been tracking the movements of the toys, he opens his atlas, puts his finger on the coordinates of the cargo spill and conceives a plan to travel in search of the elusive toys, which he's discovered are plastic, not rubber, and not only ducks but frogs, beavers, and turtles. More importantly, he's found that there were no confirmed Floatee sightings in the Atlantic. Thoroughly obsessed, he sets out to discover as much of the truth of the toys as he can, and to turn his "map into a world."In pursuit of answers Hohn travels to Seattle where he interviews a retired oceanographer who writes parodies of Sherlock Holmes stories in a self-published newsletter, Beachcomber's Alert, to Alaska where he participates in a project to airlift tons of plastic litter from an isolated stretch of coastline on the Kenai Peninsula and is made to quack like a duck in a shady bar, to the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch on a catamaran trawling for plastic debris and to China's Pearl River Delta Economic Zone where he visits the factory in which the Flotees were made. He crosses the northern Pacific in winter on a container ship passing close to the very site of the toy spill. He journeys into the North Atlantic aboard a research vessel deploying instruments in the Labrador Sea and embarks on a scientific mission aboard the first icebreaker ever to transit the entire Northwest Passage in early July.As Hohn chases his image of happy duckies a-bob on the sea, it takes on some disturbing implications. With him, we learn of the plight of the Laysan Albatross, "the world's most voracious palstivore." We learn about the chemistry of plastic, and how the vast amounts we put into our oceans concentrate deadly toxins, moving them through food chains. We discover the six degrees of freedom that ships experience, and the staggering cost in human lives the shipping industry claims each year. We learn about labor practices in Chinese factories, the rise of the toy industry and the vagaries of global consumerism. We plumb the histories of American environmentalism, arctic exploration and the changing social perceptions of childhood.Hohn masterfully weaves these diverse subjects together into a cohesive narrative told with dazzling images rendered in sparking prose. He makes us care about the plight of the Laysan Albatross, among other things, by bringing his subjects alive, focusing his clear eye intently, minutely on his surroundings and by setting the larger story of the Floatees against the backdrop of his personal experience. We see him racing to uncover flotsam mysteries in Alaska while hoping to get home for the birth of his first child. He writes as compellingly about taking a walk with his toddler along the Hudson River as he does about standing on the Arctic icecap.With Moby Duck, Hohn achieves beautifully, what he hoped his students would. He studies an ordinary object `almost illimitably long,' embarking on a journey of discovery, and I gladly followed his travels as he pursued the `cruel radiance' of rubber ducks with insight, humor and the unerring eye of a consummate storyteller, thus turning his map--indeed--into a world for himself and his readers. I look forward to his next book, which I hope will be about tweezers, cotton balls or bubble gum--or some other equally ordinary thing.

I loved it, such a great writing.

Essentially interesting book marred by bad writing. I can't believe the author taught English and is now an editor. Worth struggling through though.

Voici un livre que devraient lire tous les ministres de l'environnement et les industriels. Quand je vois l'état de nos plages biarrotes, je ne peux que comprendre cette enquête.

What a title - and what an amazing story. All credit to the author for tackling such an intriguing story. I'd like one of those ducks in MY bath.

Did they ever find all 28'800 bath toys ?Worth a read if you have an interest in oceanography, the environment or need a home a few pub quiz questions.and for the environmentalists extremists, well here is something else to be angry at