FROM PRESS REPORTS: For 14 years, oceanographers have been tracking the travels of thousands of bathtub toys, all victims of an accident on the high seas. A container load of twenty-nine thousand rubber ducks, beavers, turtles and frogs went overboard in 1992 in the middle of the Pacific. Pushed by winds and currents, the toys were carried to Alaska, where thousands washed ashore.

But hundreds more were swept up thru the Bering Strait and so far north that they would become frozen in the Arctic ice. Moving slowly with the ice across the Pole, scientists predicted the rubber ducks would take five or six years to reach the North Atlantic.

Now, 16 years after being dumped overboard, some ducks have appeared, bobbing off beaches from Maine to Massachusetts. There are thought to be many more ducks waiting to be found along the East Coast of the United States, and elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and all the way, perhaps, to Europe.