Honolulu Star-Advertiser © Susan Scott
April 30, 2012
Unfortunately it’s not one of the “Friendly Floatees” Made in China toys that went overboard in a 1992 accident.
On an early morning beach walk last week, I found on the North Shore a faded pink toy washed ashore. The 4 1/2-inch-long plastic figure, pictured at right, had big rodent teeth hanging from a smiling mouth.
“Look,” I said to Craig. “A pink rat.”
“Um, that would be a beaver,” he said. “Look at the tail.”
Oh, well, rats and beavers are both rodents. I laughed at my mistake and tossed the beat-up beaver into my basket of worth-saving marine debris.
Photo by Susan Scott
Words stamped on this bath toy beaver’s bottom say,
“Made in China, Copyright, 1984 Gerber Products Co.”
Days later the toy came to life when I heard a National Public Radio interview with Donovan Hohn, author of the book “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.”
Because I knew of the 1992 shipping accident in which a container load of made-in-China toys went overboard and subsequently drifted through the Pacific, I was only half listening. And then Hohn said two magic words: “red beavers.” Besides yellow ducks lost overboard, there were also blue turtles, green frogs and red beavers.
Could my pink rat-beaver be one of those sun-faded toys, adrift in the ocean for 20 years?
I bought a copy of Hohn’s book and looked through it but found no pictures. However, I learned that the toys lost at sea have “Friendly Floatees” stamped on them.
My beaver’s bottom says, “Made in China, Copyright, 1984 Gerber Products Co.” Alas, it is not one of the famous few. But the Internet features photos of the lost beavers, and they look like the one I found. The Friendly Floatee company might no longer distribute bathtub beavers, but Gerber does.
Where did this toy come from? How long was it at sea? The beaver isn’t talking. Still, I treasure the little figure for the entertainment it provided me in searching for its source. In beachcombing the mystery is part of the fun.
A few days later, on another fine morning, I went snorkeling with two friends off Lanikai.
“We found an interesting moray,” one called to me.
I swam over to check it out and nearly popped my eyeballs when I saw the eel was a stunning specimen of the whitemouth morph that I wrote about
earlier this month but had never seen.
In my reader Shannon’s pictures, the eel’s mouth was closed. Our Lanikai eel, though, opened wide, showing off its bright, white mouth, as if posing.
I snapped the eel’s picture, went home, dug the smiling pink beaver from its basket and took its picture, too. The two are related. They remind me, on these perfect spring mornings, how much fun it is to live in Hawaii.