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In January of 1992, a container ship called the Evergreen Everloral left Hong Kong bound for Seattle, Tacoma.

In the northern Pacific, it hit rough seas.

Not exceptionally rough, but the North Pacific and winter is always pretty rough, and the waves and conditions were stormy enough that 12 containers fell overboard.

Donovan Hohn is a writer.

Out of one container, they're emerged.

Boxes and out of the boxes, there escaped packages, and those packages, each one contained four

bath toys.

These toys were blue turtles, green frogs, red beavers, and yellow rubber duckies, and there

are more than 25,000 of them.

Collectively, they became known as the friendly floaties, and they floated across the ocean

for years, some traveling distances of 17,000 miles.

When Donovan learned about them more than a decade after the original spill, he became completely fascinated.

And just the image of containers falling overboard, of the toys going adrift.

I just wanted to imagine it.

Donovan turned his fascination into a book called Moby Duck, the true story of 28,800

bath toys lost at sea and of the beachcomers, oceanographers, environmentalists, and fools, including the author,

who went in search of them. As the Moby Duck, part of this title suggests, one of these

friendly floaties always stood out. Once they began washing ashore, you see the first news

stories about this event, and right away it it becomes rubber duckies and only the rubber

...