On January 10, 1992, a storm near the International Date Line swept 12 containers off the Ever Laurel, bound from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Washington. One held 28,800 Friendly Floatees made in China for The First Years Inc.: yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles, and green frogs. Their cardboard packaging dissolved within hours, and because the toys had no drain holes they could not sink. Seattle oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who had already tracked 61,000 Nike shoes lost from the Hansa Carrier in 1990, saw a huge drift experiment. Traditional drift bottles came back at about 2 percent, so this spill promised hundreds of data points. The first toys turned up near Sitka, Alaska on November 16, 1992, and by August 1993 beachcombers had reported about 400 along the eastern Gulf of Alaska.

Ebbesmeyer and his colleague James Ingraham fed the landfalls into OSCURS, an ocean surface current model built on atmospheric pressure data going back to 1967, and the simulated paths matched. The toys showed the North Pacific gyre circuit ran faster than earlier models suggested. Some reached Washington State in 1996, while others were predicted to travel to Japan, return toward Alaska, pass through the Bering Strait, and ride Arctic ice for years into the North Atlantic.

• The First Years offered a $100 U.S. savings bond in 2003 for verified Floatees found in New England, Canada, or Iceland.
• 2004 was a peak year for Atlantic recoveries, 12 years after the spill.
• Sunlight bleached the ducks and beavers white, while the turtles and frogs kept their color.
• In July 2007 a duck found in Devon was hailed as a Floatee until Simon Boxall of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton showed it was a modern local toy.
• The story inspired Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck and children’s books by Eve Bunting and Eric Carle.