Oceanographer seeks to bring researchers, beachcombers together.(Originated from Knight-Ridder Newspapers)

Some people collect stuff they find on the beach. Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer collects stories about that stuff and translates them into scientific data.

He's tracking the drift of 80,000 Nike shoes, 29,000 bathtub toys, 34,000 hockey gloves, half a million unopened cans of beer and 5 million LEGO toy pieces _ all fallen off ships and riding the currents to an occasional landfall. He hears from people who find strange things washed to shore, from Cracker Jack prizes to pianos. He runs experiments to see whether a rubber ducky will crack when drifting in icy waters (no) and whether a full can of beer will float (yes, but barely).

He notes exactly how many objects wash up on shore, and where; their serial numbers, if available; their species, if appropriate; their dimensions and shape; and whether they wore an encrustation of barnacles, indicating a long time at sea.

All this goes into Beachcombers' Alert, a newsletter that serves as a clearinghouse for information on ocean drifters _ from exotic tropical seeds to abandoned yachts and the tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles.

Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer with Evans-Hamilton Inc. in Seattle, started the newsletter a few years ago in an effort to bring researchers and beachcombers together to ponder the significance of flotsam and jetsam.

``Scientists think it's too silly,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``For a scientist sitting in an office, it's usually an irritant when a beachcomber calls.''

But he thinks they have a lot to offer each other.

Based on tips from beachcombers, oceanographers can track the drift of thousands of objects around the oceans _ information they can use to fine-tune their models of how the currents flow, among other things.

These currents are important not only for navigation but also for plotting the trajectories of oil spills and understanding the life of the ocean _ the spread of fish larvae, the drift of plankton and the paths that salmon take to the streams of their birth.

Ebbesmeyer estimates that 1,000 cargo containers plop into the sea from ships every year and 25 yachts are abandoned in the north Atlantic alone _ part of a growing burden of debris in the world's oceans.

It tends to collect in hot spots where prominent currents come to shore. Oregon, Washington and southern British Columbia get the north Pacific drift from Japan. Florida collects the fruits of the Gulf Stream. Northern California is out of the loop _ which makes for cleaner beaches, if less interesting beachcombing.

``The whole issue of how long things can swirl around the ocean really isn't answered,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``The whole idea of how things beach is virtually unexplored.''

For their part, beachcombers can get help identifying their finds and, at the same time, taste the excitement of research.

``It's nice to think my hobby is able to advance the cause of science a bit,'' said Steven McLeod, a 53-year-old artist who grew up in Fremont, Calif., and spent part of his childhood combing the beach south of California's Half Moon Bay.

McLeod inadvertently helped to start the Beachcombers' Alert network in 1991 when he noticed that Nike sneakers and hiking boots and Etonic golf shoes were washing up near his home in Cannon Beach, Ore.

``They were brand-new,'' he said. ``I mean, they didn't have any wear on them, and the laces were inserted through the bottom two rings and tied off. I thought something must be going on.''

He was in dire need of new hiking boots, but none of the 20 he found matched his size. Then he started hearing about people finding 40 or 80 or 100 shoes on beaches from Northern California to the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia. He organized a series of swap meets in which people matched about 500 pairs of shoes _ all wearable, after some scrubbing, despite their months adrift.

Ebbesmeyer heard about the shoe bonanza, which made headlines worldwide. Intrigued, he traced the source of the spill to the North Korean container ship Hansa Carrier, which ran into a severe storm in the north Pacific on May 27, 1990, and lost 21 cargo containers overboard. Among the lost cargo: 80,000 shoes, although it is not clear how many of them got out of the containers and went adrift.

Ebbesmeyer called a friend and collaborator, oceanographer W. James Ingraham Jr. of the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle, who uses a computer model to simulate Pacific currents.

Given the time and location of the spill, Ebbesmeyer asked, where would the shoes likely wash up?

Ingraham ran the model and came up with a simulated path that ended just north of the actual landing sites.

The two wrote up their findings in Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. At the time of the report in August 1992, a few shoes had been found on Hawaii's Big Island, having ridden the California current southward and then west. The researchers predicted that some of the shoes eventually would turn up in Japan and other parts of Asia _ if they survived.

That hasn't happened yet, McLeod said. Since some of the shoes already had eight pounds of barnacles living on them when they hit the West Coast _ ``they were whole worlds in themselves'' _ it may be that the growing burden of wildlife sank the rest.

The scientists and the beachcombers stayed in touch. It wasn't long until the next big spill _ 29,000 plastic bathtub toys that washed overboard Jan. 10, 1992, as a ship crossed the north Pacific in a severe storm. There were yellow ducks, blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs, each in a plastic housing glued to a piece of cardboard.

The researchers bought identical toys from a store and submerged them in a bucket of sea water to see how long the packages would hold together. The glue softened within a day, setting the plastic animals free.

The first half-dozen toys washed ashore in Sitka, Alaska, in November; more than 600 have been recovered so far.

``Twelve percent of the toys look like they have been chewed on, maybe by a sea otter,'' wrote Dean Orbison of Sitka, reporting the sighting of 61 toys in the latest issue of Beachcombers' Alert.

Unfortunately, the researchers wrote in a second Eos article, the initial reports were not specific enough to provide a breakdown of the number of frogs, ducks, beavers and turtles found at each location. ``Without that information,'' they said, ``we were unable to differentiate the windage of each type of toy'' _ that is, how much it would stick up above the water, allowing the wind to push it around. Rubber duckies, it turns out, have a lot more windage than Nike sneakers, and this makes it a bit trickier to predict their path.

Some of the toys probably reached the southwest Bering Sea, where they presumably spent the winter of 1994-95 frozen into the ice pack, Ebbesmeyer said.

But no matter. Tests of an identical rubber ducky in his home freezer show that the toys should have survived intact. If so, they are projected to float over the North Pole and into the north Atlantic by the year 2003.

Then there were the 34,000 hockey gloves and 34,000 sneakers that washed off the Hyundai Seattle 2,000 miles off the Washington coast after an engine-room fire Dec. 9, 1994. Although the lost cargo may also have included stuffed toys, women's sweaters, furniture and speaker systems, it was the gloves and sneakers that made it to shore _ at exactly the time and place that Ingraham predicted.

``The sneakers arrived two months later than the gloves,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``They had a little more windage. The gloves won, hands down.''

What's next?

A Chinese cargo ship capsized west of Hong Kong last June, apparently spilling 500,000 cans of beer; look for the cans to show up around the Pacific, the newsletter said.

And 4,756,940 LEGO toy pieces fell from a ship off the coast of England in February 1997. Tests show that 53 of the 100 types of LEGOs involved in the spill should float. Look for them on the beaches of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas this summer; by the year 2020, the currents should distribute the LEGOS through much of the Northern Hemisphere.

Bags of candy _ Hershey's Kisses, Tootsie Rolls, Reisen dark German chocolate and Werther's hard butterscotch _ spilled off Cape Cod last spring. When the candy reached Nantucket Island, authorities warned people not to eat it unless the bag was water-tight. The candy is projected to reach North Carolina beaches this summer.

McLeod said he has noticed a dramatic increase in the amount of beach junk over the 28 years he has been living in Oregon.

There was always a lot of fishing gear, he said; now there's a lot more of it, including millions of the small, banana-shaped plastic floats that hold up drift nets.

Some of the debris is hard to explain. Like light bulbs _ ``an astonishing number,'' McLeod said, both regular and fluorescent, that wash up unbroken, often with barnacles glued to their delicate surfaces.

Not all the drifters are artificial.

People have been finding thousands of black walnuts that may have been washed out of Central Valley groves by the floods of early 1997. They're also starting to find exotic seeds from Southeast Asia on West Coast beaches.

And some are intentional.

An artist living on a tiny island north of Amsterdam puts sketches in bottles and sets them adrift. Lovers finish bottles of wine, stuff them with passionate declarations and throw them into the surf. School kids in Astoria, Ore., put messages in bottles and release them at sea each year as part of a class project.

Two years ago, Ebbesmeyer said, a storm scrubbed away the sand at a beach in Alaska to reveal a bottle that had been cast adrift by the Imperial Russian Navy in the Sea of Okhotsk as part of an oceanographic expedition in 1912.

By far the most sobering finds involve people.

Crude rafts wash up in Florida, built by ``freedom floaters'' trying to reach the United States from Cuba, Ebbesmeyer said. Some die in the attempt. He said he was astonished to see people walk past one of these rafts near Cape Canaveral last year without giving it a glance, oblivious to the human drama it represented.

Ebbesmeyer said the single biggest unsolved mystery he has encountered is the case of a survival suit that washed up in Hawaii in 1982 _ with a human skeleton inside, missing the left arm below the elbow. It was that of a white male, 25-35 years old.

D espite an extensive investigation, authorities never discovered who the man was or what ship he came from.

``I've been working on that case for years,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``Somebody's mother is missing that guy.''

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED

Beachcombers' Alert can be reached by writing to Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer at 6306 21st Ave. NE, Seattle, Wash. 98115, or at http:\\www.beachcombers.org. Subscriptions to the newsletter are $10 a year.

(c) 1998, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

Visit Mercury Center, the World Wide Web site of the Mercury News, at http://www.sjmercury.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

Oceanographer seeks to bring researchers, beachcombers together.(Originated from Knight-Ridder Newspapers)

Some people collect stuff they find on the beach. Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer collects stories about that stuff and translates them into scientific data.

He's tracking the drift of 80,000 Nike shoes, 29,000 bathtub toys, 34,000 hockey gloves, half a million unopened cans of beer and 5 million LEGO toy pieces _ all fallen off ships and riding the currents to an occasional landfall. He hears from people who find strange things washed to shore, from Cracker Jack prizes to pianos. He runs experiments to see whether a rubber ducky will crack when drifting in icy waters (no) and whether a full can of beer will float (yes, but barely).

He notes exactly how many objects wash up on shore, and where; their serial numbers, if available; their species, if appropriate; their dimensions and shape; and whether they wore an encrustation of barnacles, indicating a long time at sea.

All this goes into Beachcombers' Alert, a newsletter that serves as a clearinghouse for information on ocean drifters _ from exotic tropical seeds to abandoned yachts and the tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles.

Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer with Evans-Hamilton Inc. in Seattle, started the newsletter a few years ago in an effort to bring researchers and beachcombers together to ponder the significance of flotsam and jetsam.

``Scientists think it's too silly,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``For a scientist sitting in an office, it's usually an irritant when a beachcomber calls.''

But he thinks they have a lot to offer each other.

Based on tips from beachcombers, oceanographers can track the drift of thousands of objects around the oceans _ information they can use to fine-tune their models of how the currents flow, among other things.

These currents are important not only for navigation but also for plotting the trajectories of oil spills and understanding the life of the ocean _ the spread of fish larvae, the drift of plankton and the paths that salmon take to the streams of their birth.

Ebbesmeyer estimates that 1,000 cargo containers plop into the sea from ships every year and 25 yachts are abandoned in the north Atlantic alone _ part of a growing burden of debris in the world's oceans.

It tends to collect in hot spots where prominent currents come to shore. Oregon, Washington and southern British Columbia get the north Pacific drift from Japan. Florida collects the fruits of the Gulf Stream. Northern California is out of the loop _ which makes for cleaner beaches, if less interesting beachcombing.

``The whole issue of how long things can swirl around the ocean really isn't answered,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``The whole idea of how things beach is virtually unexplored.''

For their part, beachcombers can get help identifying their finds and, at the same time, taste the excitement of research.

``It's nice to think my hobby is able to advance the cause of science a bit,'' said Steven McLeod, a 53-year-old artist who grew up in Fremont, Calif., and spent part of his childhood combing the beach south of California's Half Moon Bay.

McLeod inadvertently helped to start the Beachcombers' Alert network in 1991 when he noticed that Nike sneakers and hiking boots and Etonic golf shoes were washing up near his home in Cannon Beach, Ore.

``They were brand-new,'' he said. ``I mean, they didn't have any wear on them, and the laces were inserted through the bottom two rings and tied off. I thought something must be going on.''

He was in dire need of new hiking boots, but none of the 20 he found matched his size. Then he started hearing about people finding 40 or 80 or 100 shoes on beaches from Northern California to the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia. He organized a series of swap meets in which people matched about 500 pairs of shoes _ all wearable, after some scrubbing, despite their months adrift.

Ebbesmeyer heard about the shoe bonanza, which made headlines worldwide. Intrigued, he traced the source of the spill to the North Korean container ship Hansa Carrier, which ran into a severe storm in the north Pacific on May 27, 1990, and lost 21 cargo containers overboard. Among the lost cargo: 80,000 shoes, although it is not clear how many of them got out of the containers and went adrift.

Ebbesmeyer called a friend and collaborator, oceanographer W. James Ingraham Jr. of the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle, who uses a computer model to simulate Pacific currents.

Given the time and location of the spill, Ebbesmeyer asked, where would the shoes likely wash up?

Ingraham ran the model and came up with a simulated path that ended just north of the actual landing sites.

The two wrote up their findings in Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. At the time of the report in August 1992, a few shoes had been found on Hawaii's Big Island, having ridden the California current southward and then west. The researchers predicted that some of the shoes eventually would turn up in Japan and other parts of Asia _ if they survived.

That hasn't happened yet, McLeod said. Since some of the shoes already had eight pounds of barnacles living on them when they hit the West Coast _ ``they were whole worlds in themselves'' _ it may be that the growing burden of wildlife sank the rest.

The scientists and the beachcombers stayed in touch. It wasn't long until the next big spill _ 29,000 plastic bathtub toys that washed overboard Jan. 10, 1992, as a ship crossed the north Pacific in a severe storm. There were yellow ducks, blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs, each in a plastic housing glued to a piece of cardboard.

The researchers bought identical toys from a store and submerged them in a bucket of sea water to see how long the packages would hold together. The glue softened within a day, setting the plastic animals free.

The first half-dozen toys washed ashore in Sitka, Alaska, in November; more than 600 have been recovered so far.

``Twelve percent of the toys look like they have been chewed on, maybe by a sea otter,'' wrote Dean Orbison of Sitka, reporting the sighting of 61 toys in the latest issue of Beachcombers' Alert.

Unfortunately, the researchers wrote in a second Eos article, the initial reports were not specific enough to provide a breakdown of the number of frogs, ducks, beavers and turtles found at each location. ``Without that information,'' they said, ``we were unable to differentiate the windage of each type of toy'' _ that is, how much it would stick up above the water, allowing the wind to push it around. Rubber duckies, it turns out, have a lot more windage than Nike sneakers, and this makes it a bit trickier to predict their path.

Some of the toys probably reached the southwest Bering Sea, where they presumably spent the winter of 1994-95 frozen into the ice pack, Ebbesmeyer said.

But no matter. Tests of an identical rubber ducky in his home freezer show that the toys should have survived intact. If so, they are projected to float over the North Pole and into the north Atlantic by the year 2003.

Then there were the 34,000 hockey gloves and 34,000 sneakers that washed off the Hyundai Seattle 2,000 miles off the Washington coast after an engine-room fire Dec. 9, 1994. Although the lost cargo may also have included stuffed toys, women's sweaters, furniture and speaker systems, it was the gloves and sneakers that made it to shore _ at exactly the time and place that Ingraham predicted.

``The sneakers arrived two months later than the gloves,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``They had a little more windage. The gloves won, hands down.''

What's next?

A Chinese cargo ship capsized west of Hong Kong last June, apparently spilling 500,000 cans of beer; look for the cans to show up around the Pacific, the newsletter said.

And 4,756,940 LEGO toy pieces fell from a ship off the coast of England in February 1997. Tests show that 53 of the 100 types of LEGOs involved in the spill should float. Look for them on the beaches of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas this summer; by the year 2020, the currents should distribute the LEGOS through much of the Northern Hemisphere.

Bags of candy _ Hershey's Kisses, Tootsie Rolls, Reisen dark German chocolate and Werther's hard butterscotch _ spilled off Cape Cod last spring. When the candy reached Nantucket Island, authorities warned people not to eat it unless the bag was water-tight. The candy is projected to reach North Carolina beaches this summer.

McLeod said he has noticed a dramatic increase in the amount of beach junk over the 28 years he has been living in Oregon.

There was always a lot of fishing gear, he said; now there's a lot more of it, including millions of the small, banana-shaped plastic floats that hold up drift nets.

Some of the debris is hard to explain. Like light bulbs _ ``an astonishing number,'' McLeod said, both regular and fluorescent, that wash up unbroken, often with barnacles glued to their delicate surfaces.

Not all the drifters are artificial.

People have been finding thousands of black walnuts that may have been washed out of Central Valley groves by the floods of early 1997. They're also starting to find exotic seeds from Southeast Asia on West Coast beaches.

And some are intentional.

An artist living on a tiny island north of Amsterdam puts sketches in bottles and sets them adrift. Lovers finish bottles of wine, stuff them with passionate declarations and throw them into the surf. School kids in Astoria, Ore., put messages in bottles and release them at sea each year as part of a class project.

Two years ago, Ebbesmeyer said, a storm scrubbed away the sand at a beach in Alaska to reveal a bottle that had been cast adrift by the Imperial Russian Navy in the Sea of Okhotsk as part of an oceanographic expedition in 1912.

By far the most sobering finds involve people.

Crude rafts wash up in Florida, built by ``freedom floaters'' trying to reach the United States from Cuba, Ebbesmeyer said. Some die in the attempt. He said he was astonished to see people walk past one of these rafts near Cape Canaveral last year without giving it a glance, oblivious to the human drama it represented.

Ebbesmeyer said the single biggest unsolved mystery he has encountered is the case of a survival suit that washed up in Hawaii in 1982 _ with a human skeleton inside, missing the left arm below the elbow. It was that of a white male, 25-35 years old.

D espite an extensive investigation, authorities never discovered who the man was or what ship he came from.

``I've been working on that case for years,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``Somebody's mother is missing that guy.''

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED

Beachcombers' Alert can be reached by writing to Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer at 6306 21st Ave. NE, Seattle, Wash. 98115, or at http:\\www.beachcombers.org. Subscriptions to the newsletter are $10 a year.

(c) 1998, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

Visit Mercury Center, the World Wide Web site of the Mercury News, at http://www.sjmercury.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

Oceanographer seeks to bring researchers, beachcombers together.(Originated from Knight-Ridder Newspapers)

Some people collect stuff they find on the beach. Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer collects stories about that stuff and translates them into scientific data.

He's tracking the drift of 80,000 Nike shoes, 29,000 bathtub toys, 34,000 hockey gloves, half a million unopened cans of beer and 5 million LEGO toy pieces _ all fallen off ships and riding the currents to an occasional landfall. He hears from people who find strange things washed to shore, from Cracker Jack prizes to pianos. He runs experiments to see whether a rubber ducky will crack when drifting in icy waters (no) and whether a full can of beer will float (yes, but barely).

He notes exactly how many objects wash up on shore, and where; their serial numbers, if available; their species, if appropriate; their dimensions and shape; and whether they wore an encrustation of barnacles, indicating a long time at sea.

All this goes into Beachcombers' Alert, a newsletter that serves as a clearinghouse for information on ocean drifters _ from exotic tropical seeds to abandoned yachts and the tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles.

Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer with Evans-Hamilton Inc. in Seattle, started the newsletter a few years ago in an effort to bring researchers and beachcombers together to ponder the significance of flotsam and jetsam.

``Scientists think it's too silly,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``For a scientist sitting in an office, it's usually an irritant when a beachcomber calls.''

But he thinks they have a lot to offer each other.

Based on tips from beachcombers, oceanographers can track the drift of thousands of objects around the oceans _ information they can use to fine-tune their models of how the currents flow, among other things.

These currents are important not only for navigation but also for plotting the trajectories of oil spills and understanding the life of the ocean _ the spread of fish larvae, the drift of plankton and the paths that salmon take to the streams of their birth.

Ebbesmeyer estimates that 1,000 cargo containers plop into the sea from ships every year and 25 yachts are abandoned in the north Atlantic alone _ part of a growing burden of debris in the world's oceans.

It tends to collect in hot spots where prominent currents come to shore. Oregon, Washington and southern British Columbia get the north Pacific drift from Japan. Florida collects the fruits of the Gulf Stream. Northern California is out of the loop _ which makes for cleaner beaches, if less interesting beachcombing.

``The whole issue of how long things can swirl around the ocean really isn't answered,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``The whole idea of how things beach is virtually unexplored.''

For their part, beachcombers can get help identifying their finds and, at the same time, taste the excitement of research.

``It's nice to think my hobby is able to advance the cause of science a bit,'' said Steven McLeod, a 53-year-old artist who grew up in Fremont, Calif., and spent part of his childhood combing the beach south of California's Half Moon Bay.

McLeod inadvertently helped to start the Beachcombers' Alert network in 1991 when he noticed that Nike sneakers and hiking boots and Etonic golf shoes were washing up near his home in Cannon Beach, Ore.

``They were brand-new,'' he said. ``I mean, they didn't have any wear on them, and the laces were inserted through the bottom two rings and tied off. I thought something must be going on.''

He was in dire need of new hiking boots, but none of the 20 he found matched his size. Then he started hearing about people finding 40 or 80 or 100 shoes on beaches from Northern California to the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia. He organized a series of swap meets in which people matched about 500 pairs of shoes _ all wearable, after some scrubbing, despite their months adrift.

Ebbesmeyer heard about the shoe bonanza, which made headlines worldwide. Intrigued, he traced the source of the spill to the North Korean container ship Hansa Carrier, which ran into a severe storm in the north Pacific on May 27, 1990, and lost 21 cargo containers overboard. Among the lost cargo: 80,000 shoes, although it is not clear how many of them got out of the containers and went adrift.

Ebbesmeyer called a friend and collaborator, oceanographer W. James Ingraham Jr. of the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle, who uses a computer model to simulate Pacific currents.

Given the time and location of the spill, Ebbesmeyer asked, where would the shoes likely wash up?

Ingraham ran the model and came up with a simulated path that ended just north of the actual landing sites.

The two wrote up their findings in Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. At the time of the report in August 1992, a few shoes had been found on Hawaii's Big Island, having ridden the California current southward and then west. The researchers predicted that some of the shoes eventually would turn up in Japan and other parts of Asia _ if they survived.

That hasn't happened yet, McLeod said. Since some of the shoes already had eight pounds of barnacles living on them when they hit the West Coast _ ``they were whole worlds in themselves'' _ it may be that the growing burden of wildlife sank the rest.

The scientists and the beachcombers stayed in touch. It wasn't long until the next big spill _ 29,000 plastic bathtub toys that washed overboard Jan. 10, 1992, as a ship crossed the north Pacific in a severe storm. There were yellow ducks, blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs, each in a plastic housing glued to a piece of cardboard.

The researchers bought identical toys from a store and submerged them in a bucket of sea water to see how long the packages would hold together. The glue softened within a day, setting the plastic animals free.

The first half-dozen toys washed ashore in Sitka, Alaska, in November; more than 600 have been recovered so far.

``Twelve percent of the toys look like they have been chewed on, maybe by a sea otter,'' wrote Dean Orbison of Sitka, reporting the sighting of 61 toys in the latest issue of Beachcombers' Alert.

Unfortunately, the researchers wrote in a second Eos article, the initial reports were not specific enough to provide a breakdown of the number of frogs, ducks, beavers and turtles found at each location. ``Without that information,'' they said, ``we were unable to differentiate the windage of each type of toy'' _ that is, how much it would stick up above the water, allowing the wind to push it around. Rubber duckies, it turns out, have a lot more windage than Nike sneakers, and this makes it a bit trickier to predict their path.

Some of the toys probably reached the southwest Bering Sea, where they presumably spent the winter of 1994-95 frozen into the ice pack, Ebbesmeyer said.

But no matter. Tests of an identical rubber ducky in his home freezer show that the toys should have survived intact. If so, they are projected to float over the North Pole and into the north Atlantic by the year 2003.

Then there were the 34,000 hockey gloves and 34,000 sneakers that washed off the Hyundai Seattle 2,000 miles off the Washington coast after an engine-room fire Dec. 9, 1994. Although the lost cargo may also have included stuffed toys, women's sweaters, furniture and speaker systems, it was the gloves and sneakers that made it to shore _ at exactly the time and place that Ingraham predicted.

``The sneakers arrived two months later than the gloves,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``They had a little more windage. The gloves won, hands down.''

What's next?

A Chinese cargo ship capsized west of Hong Kong last June, apparently spilling 500,000 cans of beer; look for the cans to show up around the Pacific, the newsletter said.

And 4,756,940 LEGO toy pieces fell from a ship off the coast of England in February 1997. Tests show that 53 of the 100 types of LEGOs involved in the spill should float. Look for them on the beaches of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas this summer; by the year 2020, the currents should distribute the LEGOS through much of the Northern Hemisphere.

Bags of candy _ Hershey's Kisses, Tootsie Rolls, Reisen dark German chocolate and Werther's hard butterscotch _ spilled off Cape Cod last spring. When the candy reached Nantucket Island, authorities warned people not to eat it unless the bag was water-tight. The candy is projected to reach North Carolina beaches this summer.

McLeod said he has noticed a dramatic increase in the amount of beach junk over the 28 years he has been living in Oregon.

There was always a lot of fishing gear, he said; now there's a lot more of it, including millions of the small, banana-shaped plastic floats that hold up drift nets.

Some of the debris is hard to explain. Like light bulbs _ ``an astonishing number,'' McLeod said, both regular and fluorescent, that wash up unbroken, often with barnacles glued to their delicate surfaces.

Not all the drifters are artificial.

People have been finding thousands of black walnuts that may have been washed out of Central Valley groves by the floods of early 1997. They're also starting to find exotic seeds from Southeast Asia on West Coast beaches.

And some are intentional.

An artist living on a tiny island north of Amsterdam puts sketches in bottles and sets them adrift. Lovers finish bottles of wine, stuff them with passionate declarations and throw them into the surf. School kids in Astoria, Ore., put messages in bottles and release them at sea each year as part of a class project.

Two years ago, Ebbesmeyer said, a storm scrubbed away the sand at a beach in Alaska to reveal a bottle that had been cast adrift by the Imperial Russian Navy in the Sea of Okhotsk as part of an oceanographic expedition in 1912.

By far the most sobering finds involve people.

Crude rafts wash up in Florida, built by ``freedom floaters'' trying to reach the United States from Cuba, Ebbesmeyer said. Some die in the attempt. He said he was astonished to see people walk past one of these rafts near Cape Canaveral last year without giving it a glance, oblivious to the human drama it represented.

Ebbesmeyer said the single biggest unsolved mystery he has encountered is the case of a survival suit that washed up in Hawaii in 1982 _ with a human skeleton inside, missing the left arm below the elbow. It was that of a white male, 25-35 years old.

D espite an extensive investigation, authorities never discovered who the man was or what ship he came from.

``I've been working on that case for years,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``Somebody's mother is missing that guy.''

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED

Beachcombers' Alert can be reached by writing to Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer at 6306 21st Ave. NE, Seattle, Wash. 98115, or at http:\\www.beachcombers.org. Subscriptions to the newsletter are $10 a year.

(c) 1998, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

Visit Mercury Center, the World Wide Web site of the Mercury News, at http://www.sjmercury.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

Oceanographer seeks to bring researchers, beachcombers together.(Originated from Knight-Ridder Newspapers)

Some people collect stuff they find on the beach. Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer collects stories about that stuff and translates them into scientific data.

He's tracking the drift of 80,000 Nike shoes, 29,000 bathtub toys, 34,000 hockey gloves, half a million unopened cans of beer and 5 million LEGO toy pieces _ all fallen off ships and riding the currents to an occasional landfall. He hears from people who find strange things washed to shore, from Cracker Jack prizes to pianos. He runs experiments to see whether a rubber ducky will crack when drifting in icy waters (no) and whether a full can of beer will float (yes, but barely).

He notes exactly how many objects wash up on shore, and where; their serial numbers, if available; their species, if appropriate; their dimensions and shape; and whether they wore an encrustation of barnacles, indicating a long time at sea.

All this goes into Beachcombers' Alert, a newsletter that serves as a clearinghouse for information on ocean drifters _ from exotic tropical seeds to abandoned yachts and the tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles.

Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer with Evans-Hamilton Inc. in Seattle, started the newsletter a few years ago in an effort to bring researchers and beachcombers together to ponder the significance of flotsam and jetsam.

``Scientists think it's too silly,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``For a scientist sitting in an office, it's usually an irritant when a beachcomber calls.''

But he thinks they have a lot to offer each other.

Based on tips from beachcombers, oceanographers can track the drift of thousands of objects around the oceans _ information they can use to fine-tune their models of how the currents flow, among other things.

These currents are important not only for navigation but also for plotting the trajectories of oil spills and understanding the life of the ocean _ the spread of fish larvae, the drift of plankton and the paths that salmon take to the streams of their birth.

Ebbesmeyer estimates that 1,000 cargo containers plop into the sea from ships every year and 25 yachts are abandoned in the north Atlantic alone _ part of a growing burden of debris in the world's oceans.

It tends to collect in hot spots where prominent currents come to shore. Oregon, Washington and southern British Columbia get the north Pacific drift from Japan. Florida collects the fruits of the Gulf Stream. Northern California is out of the loop _ which makes for cleaner beaches, if less interesting beachcombing.

``The whole issue of how long things can swirl around the ocean really isn't answered,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``The whole idea of how things beach is virtually unexplored.''

For their part, beachcombers can get help identifying their finds and, at the same time, taste the excitement of research.

``It's nice to think my hobby is able to advance the cause of science a bit,'' said Steven McLeod, a 53-year-old artist who grew up in Fremont, Calif., and spent part of his childhood combing the beach south of California's Half Moon Bay.

McLeod inadvertently helped to start the Beachcombers' Alert network in 1991 when he noticed that Nike sneakers and hiking boots and Etonic golf shoes were washing up near his home in Cannon Beach, Ore.

``They were brand-new,'' he said. ``I mean, they didn't have any wear on them, and the laces were inserted through the bottom two rings and tied off. I thought something must be going on.''

He was in dire need of new hiking boots, but none of the 20 he found matched his size. Then he started hearing about people finding 40 or 80 or 100 shoes on beaches from Northern California to the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia. He organized a series of swap meets in which people matched about 500 pairs of shoes _ all wearable, after some scrubbing, despite their months adrift.

Ebbesmeyer heard about the shoe bonanza, which made headlines worldwide. Intrigued, he traced the source of the spill to the North Korean container ship Hansa Carrier, which ran into a severe storm in the north Pacific on May 27, 1990, and lost 21 cargo containers overboard. Among the lost cargo: 80,000 shoes, although it is not clear how many of them got out of the containers and went adrift.

Ebbesmeyer called a friend and collaborator, oceanographer W. James Ingraham Jr. of the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle, who uses a computer model to simulate Pacific currents.

Given the time and location of the spill, Ebbesmeyer asked, where would the shoes likely wash up?

Ingraham ran the model and came up with a simulated path that ended just north of the actual landing sites.

The two wrote up their findings in Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. At the time of the report in August 1992, a few shoes had been found on Hawaii's Big Island, having ridden the California current southward and then west. The researchers predicted that some of the shoes eventually would turn up in Japan and other parts of Asia _ if they survived.

That hasn't happened yet, McLeod said. Since some of the shoes already had eight pounds of barnacles living on them when they hit the West Coast _ ``they were whole worlds in themselves'' _ it may be that the growing burden of wildlife sank the rest.

The scientists and the beachcombers stayed in touch. It wasn't long until the next big spill _ 29,000 plastic bathtub toys that washed overboard Jan. 10, 1992, as a ship crossed the north Pacific in a severe storm. There were yellow ducks, blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs, each in a plastic housing glued to a piece of cardboard.

The researchers bought identical toys from a store and submerged them in a bucket of sea water to see how long the packages would hold together. The glue softened within a day, setting the plastic animals free.

The first half-dozen toys washed ashore in Sitka, Alaska, in November; more than 600 have been recovered so far.

``Twelve percent of the toys look like they have been chewed on, maybe by a sea otter,'' wrote Dean Orbison of Sitka, reporting the sighting of 61 toys in the latest issue of Beachcombers' Alert.

Unfortunately, the researchers wrote in a second Eos article, the initial reports were not specific enough to provide a breakdown of the number of frogs, ducks, beavers and turtles found at each location. ``Without that information,'' they said, ``we were unable to differentiate the windage of each type of toy'' _ that is, how much it would stick up above the water, allowing the wind to push it around. Rubber duckies, it turns out, have a lot more windage than Nike sneakers, and this makes it a bit trickier to predict their path.

Some of the toys probably reached the southwest Bering Sea, where they presumably spent the winter of 1994-95 frozen into the ice pack, Ebbesmeyer said.

But no matter. Tests of an identical rubber ducky in his home freezer show that the toys should have survived intact. If so, they are projected to float over the North Pole and into the north Atlantic by the year 2003.

Then there were the 34,000 hockey gloves and 34,000 sneakers that washed off the Hyundai Seattle 2,000 miles off the Washington coast after an engine-room fire Dec. 9, 1994. Although the lost cargo may also have included stuffed toys, women's sweaters, furniture and speaker systems, it was the gloves and sneakers that made it to shore _ at exactly the time and place that Ingraham predicted.

``The sneakers arrived two months later than the gloves,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``They had a little more windage. The gloves won, hands down.''

What's next?

A Chinese cargo ship capsized west of Hong Kong last June, apparently spilling 500,000 cans of beer; look for the cans to show up around the Pacific, the newsletter said.

And 4,756,940 LEGO toy pieces fell from a ship off the coast of England in February 1997. Tests show that 53 of the 100 types of LEGOs involved in the spill should float. Look for them on the beaches of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas this summer; by the year 2020, the currents should distribute the LEGOS through much of the Northern Hemisphere.

Bags of candy _ Hershey's Kisses, Tootsie Rolls, Reisen dark German chocolate and Werther's hard butterscotch _ spilled off Cape Cod last spring. When the candy reached Nantucket Island, authorities warned people not to eat it unless the bag was water-tight. The candy is projected to reach North Carolina beaches this summer.

McLeod said he has noticed a dramatic increase in the amount of beach junk over the 28 years he has been living in Oregon.

There was always a lot of fishing gear, he said; now there's a lot more of it, including millions of the small, banana-shaped plastic floats that hold up drift nets.

Some of the debris is hard to explain. Like light bulbs _ ``an astonishing number,'' McLeod said, both regular and fluorescent, that wash up unbroken, often with barnacles glued to their delicate surfaces.

Not all the drifters are artificial.

People have been finding thousands of black walnuts that may have been washed out of Central Valley groves by the floods of early 1997. They're also starting to find exotic seeds from Southeast Asia on West Coast beaches.

And some are intentional.

An artist living on a tiny island north of Amsterdam puts sketches in bottles and sets them adrift. Lovers finish bottles of wine, stuff them with passionate declarations and throw them into the surf. School kids in Astoria, Ore., put messages in bottles and release them at sea each year as part of a class project.

Two years ago, Ebbesmeyer said, a storm scrubbed away the sand at a beach in Alaska to reveal a bottle that had been cast adrift by the Imperial Russian Navy in the Sea of Okhotsk as part of an oceanographic expedition in 1912.

By far the most sobering finds involve people.

Crude rafts wash up in Florida, built by ``freedom floaters'' trying to reach the United States from Cuba, Ebbesmeyer said. Some die in the attempt. He said he was astonished to see people walk past one of these rafts near Cape Canaveral last year without giving it a glance, oblivious to the human drama it represented.

Ebbesmeyer said the single biggest unsolved mystery he has encountered is the case of a survival suit that washed up in Hawaii in 1982 _ with a human skeleton inside, missing the left arm below the elbow. It was that of a white male, 25-35 years old.

D espite an extensive investigation, authorities never discovered who the man was or what ship he came from.

``I've been working on that case for years,'' Ebbesmeyer said. ``Somebody's mother is missing that guy.''

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED

Beachcombers' Alert can be reached by writing to Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer at 6306 21st Ave. NE, Seattle, Wash. 98115, or at http:\\www.beachcombers.org. Subscriptions to the newsletter are $10 a year.

(c) 1998, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

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