The so-called "wood slick" created by the escape of timber from the stricken Ice Prince must have made for a scary sight for passing ships or any creature unlucky enough to get in its way.

Yet, while this particular incident proved to be a major talking point for most people locally last week, it is far from a rare occurrence globally and something which happens with increasing regularity.

My favourite story concerning the accidental loss of cargo at sea involves a shipment of bath toys that were lost overboard from a container ship in the northern Pacific Ocean on January 10, 1992.

Almost 29,000 toys were lost that day, including rubber ducks, turtles, beavers and frogs of various colours.

For almost 10 months, the cargo was lost at sea, having been caught in the current known as the Subpolar Gyre.

This ensured that the bath toys floated some 2,200 miles before starting to beach in Alaska in November, 1992.

However, large numbers of the toys did not make landfall straight away and continued on their merry journey, with further beachings in the Aleutian Islands in early 1993.

The remaining seafarers then headed towards warmer waters towards the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, before looping around the Pacific, caught in the current.

By now, the convoy of ducks was attracting widespread interest, not just from beachcombers but also from the scientific community, keen to use the ducks as an opportunity to study ocean currents.

By 1995, most of the remaining ducks had completed their first loop of the Pacific Ocean, although a few had broken away and reached shores as far away as Hawaii (if you look at a map of the Pacific Ocean, you'll see how far away this is!).

By now, scientists had worked out that the ducks were travelling about 50 per cent faster than the current that was carrying them.

What they couldn't be prepared for, though, was the fact that some of the ducks would escape from the treadmill of the Pacific currents and become locked into pack ice in the Bering Sea.

The ducks would then find the Northwest Passage (no, really!) and eventually find their way through the ice and into the North Atlantic.

By 2003, the First Years Corporation (which had manufactured the ducks) was offering rewards to people finding the toys in New England, Canada and even Britain.

The first of the toys to reach our shores was discovered by a dog walker on a beach in Devon last summer. She apparently returned the barnacle encrusted and somewhat disintegrated toy back to First Years and claimed her $100 reward.

While this is an amusing story, it does illustrate how long some of this lost cargo can remain in the environment.

When you consider that approximately 10,000 containers are lost overboard each year, the scale of the problem is also rather frightening.