Quack !

The Mystery of the Yellow Ducks

It was a sunny day in June when Jake and his sister Mia decided to go to the beach with their parents. They loved playing in the sand, building castles and digging holes. They also liked to collect shells, rocks and other interesting things that washed up on the shore.

As they walked along the water’s edge, Jake noticed something bright and yellow among the seaweed. He ran over to pick it up and saw that it was a rubber duck. He smiled and showed it to Mia.

“Look what I found! A rubber duck!” he said.

“Wow, that’s cool! Where did it come from?” Mia asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe someone lost it in the water,” Jake guessed.

They looked around and saw more yellow dots on the sand. They followed them and found more rubber ducks of different shapes and sizes. Some were plain yellow, some had hats or sunglasses, some had numbers or letters on them.

“Wow, there are so many of them! How did they get here?” Mia wondered.

“Maybe they fell off a boat or something,” Jake suggested.

They decided to collect as many as they could and put them in a bucket. They counted 23 ducks in total.

“Maybe we should tell someone about this,” Mia said.

“Yeah, maybe someone is looking for them,” Jake agreed.

They ran back to their parents who were sitting under an umbrella reading books. They showed them their bucket of ducks and told them what they had found.

“That’s very strange,” their mom said. “Where do you think they came from?”

“We don’t know,” Jake said. “Maybe they fell off a boat or something.”

Their dad took out his phone and searched online for “rubber ducks washing up on beach”. He found several articles about similar events that had happened around the world over the past decades. He read one of them aloud:

“In 1992, a container ship carrying 28,800 rubber bath toys was hit by a storm in the Pacific Ocean near Alaska. The container broke open and released thousands of yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles and green frogs into the water. Since then, these toys have been drifting across oceans and continents with ocean currents. Some have been found as far away as Australia, South Africa and Europe. Scientists have used these toys to study ocean currents and track their movements.”

Jake and Mia listened with wide eyes.

“So these ducks have been traveling around the world for over 30 years?” Jake asked.

“That’s amazing!” Mia exclaimed.

“But how did they end up here?” Jake wondered.

“So, these ducks are like little explorers!” Mia said.

“Yeah, they are!” Jake agreed.

They decided to keep some of the ducks as souvenirs of their adventure and donate the rest to a local charity that collected toys for children in need.