About 33,000 Nike basketball shoes plopped into the sea when a cargo ship ran adrift near Tacoma, Washington. They are unlaced and wet, though still wearable — so beachcombers are trying to match them up into pairs. But finding one’s mate can be tough when you’re all soggy and bloated and covered with barnacles.
Over the past decade, Curtis Ebbesmeyer has tracked 29,000 duckies, turtles and other bathtub toys; 3 million tiny Legos; 34,000 hockey gloves; and 50,000 Nike cross-trainers that went overboard in the Pacific in 1999. He and government oceanographer Jim Ingraham have published their results in academic journals as well as Ebbesmeyer’s newsletter, Beachcombers’ Alert. After the two shoes washed ashore on the Olympic Peninsula in January, Ebbesmeyer calculated that they had moved more than 450 miles in a month – up to 18 miles a day. At that pace, he calculated the Nikes could bob and weave an additional 1,600 miles by the time the current eases in mid-April, sprinkling basketball shoes along the Gulf of Alaska and Aleutian coasts. Lee Weinstein, a spokesman for Beaverton, Ore.- based Nike, said beachcombers who find shoes can mail them to Nike for recycling.