Flotsam and Jetsam

For some reason I find the terms flotsam and jetsam fascinating, conjuring up images of old sailing ships sinking and lots of wooden wreckage. But what do they mean exactly?

As the name suggests, jetsam is goods or cargo which has been deliberately jettisoned by the crew, perhaps to lighten the ship in an emergency. Flotsam on the other hand is goods that are left floating after a shipwreck or that have been washed overboard accidentally. These days flotsam also tends to cover naturally occuring floating debris like driftwood.

Ships containers are lost overboard fairly regularly making dangerous flotsam for small boats. Also a lot of modern flotsam is plastic and not environmentally friendly.

Some recent flotsam has produced interesting data for oceanographers. In 1992 a ship in the North Pacific lost 29,000 yellow plastic ducks and other animals overboard. Initially caught in a revolving current in the North Pacific ducks showed up on the Alaskan coast of North America and then a few years later in 1995 on the Japanese coast. By the late 1990s some ducks on the second go around the current again arrived in Alaska, and a few lucky ones turned up in Hawaii. Some ducks escaped the current to the north and became frozen in the ice travelling eastward as the ice moved across the polar region. By 2000, ducks were appearing on the East coast of North America and in 2007 one intrepid duck had made it to the UK.

On the jetsam side, some people may recall the mysterious disappearance of the 19m Yacht Patanela on 8th November 1988 off Botany Bay. The boat was enroute from Fremantle to the Whitsundays and no clues have ever come to light as to what happened. Unrelated to the yachts disappearance, in 2007 a message in a bottle was found at Eucla on the south coast of WA. The bottle contained a message from one of the crewmen of the Patanela inviting the finder to a free holiday on board the yacht when they reached the Whitsundays. The message also showed that the bottle had been thrown overboard south of Eucla in the Great Australian Bight and has possibly lain undiscovered at Eucla for some time.