A consignment of Friendly Floatee toys, manufactured in China for The First Years Inc., departed from Hong Kong on a
container ship, the
Ever Laurel,
[2] destined for
Tacoma, Washington, U.S.. On 10 January 1992, during a storm in the North Pacific Ocean close to the
International Date Line, twelve 40-foot (13.3 m)
intermodal containers were washed overboard. One of these containers held 28,800 Floatees,
[3] a child's bath toy which came in a number of forms: red
beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow
ducks. At some point, the container opened (possibly due to collision with other containers or the ship itself) and the Floatees were released. Although each toy was mounted in a plastic housing attached to a backing card, subsequent tests showed that the cardboard quickly degraded in sea water allowing the Floatees to escape. Unlike many bath toys, Friendly Floatees have no holes in them so they do not take on water.
Seattle oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham, who were working on an ocean surface current model, began to track their progress. The mass release of 28,800 objects into the ocean at one time offered significant advantages over the standard method of releasing 500–1000 drift bottles. The recovery rate of objects from the Pacific Ocean is typically around 2%, so rather than the 10 to 20 recoveries typically seen with a drift bottle release, the two scientists expected numbers closer to 600. They were already tracking various other spills of flotsam, including 61,000
Nike running shoes that had been lost overboard in 1990.