If you thought beachcombing wasn't a viable professional skill, think again:

Beachcomber extraordinaire Dean Orbison has been assidiously recovering some of the 28,800 rubber duckies, turtles, beavers and frogs lost at sea when a cargo container holding them in 1992 "splashed into the mid-Pacific, where the 45th parallel intersects the International Date Line (44.7 N, 178.1 E)."

At Sitka's second annual beachcomber fair held on 25 July 2004, Dean Orbison and son Tyler Orbison, 22, exhibited a hamper full of 111 toys they'd beachcombed nearby Sitka during 1993-2004. The basket held comparable numbers: 18% turtles, 35% ducks, 26% beavers, and 21% frogs. During years at sea, the ducks and beavers faded to white while the turtles and frogs remained original blue and green, respectively. Animal bites and the surf smashing them against rocks had ruptured many.

Through the years, Dean patiently recorded the date and location where they found ninety of the fist-sized toys. This astonishing record reveals peak recoveries in five years with intervening gaps of 2, 4, 3, and 3 years, i.e., 1992-1994-1998-2001-2004. Each year, Dean and Tyler conducted comparable beachcombing effort so the peaks in the time line are not the result of differing times spent along the shore. The first peak occurred before the Orbisons began recording, but a year in which other beachcombers reported hundreds. We may safely assume an initial peak in 1992, the year the playthings first invaded Sitka.

Why should the rubber duckies wash up in Sitka in clustered patterns? Enter oceannographer Jim Ingraham. The duckies were riding a vast circulatory current in the ocean called a Gyre.

I'm kidding, of course. But it's fun all the same to note that rubber squeak toys date to the late 1800s--precisely the moment that Lewis Carroll wrote his most famous nonsense poem.