X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Friendly Floatees


Donovan Hohn

Donovan Hohn is the author of 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, the tale of the Friendly Floatees.

Friendly Floatees

--where did "Friendly" come from? original package just says "Floatees"-->are plastic bath toys marketed by The First Years, Inc. and made famous by the work of Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who models ocean currents on the basis of flotsam movements including those of a consignment of Friendly Floatees, containing 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles and green frogs, washed into the Pacific Ocean in 1992.

Eric Carle wrote a children's book 10 Little Rubber Ducks inspired by the Floatees (Harper Collins 2005, ISBN 978-0-00-720242-3).


Flow tracer

When 28,000 Friendly Floatees plastic ducks and other toys were washed overboard from a container ship in the Pacific Ocean in 1992, oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer used them for the calibration and verification of ocean current models.


see also