About a week ago, a soccer ball that belonged to a 16-year-old survivor of the Japanese tsunami was returned to him, after it was discovered on the Alaskan coast. But a beachcomber in Canada has since stumbled across an even more fantastic find: a Harley Davidson, with all its parts still in place.
Peter Mark was riding his ATV on a beach on British Columbia’s Haida Gwaii Islands when he spotted a large, battered, white detached trailer. The door was ripped off, and Mark peered inside and spotted a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
Covered in rust, the bike was still intact and still carried a licence plate registered in Miyagi prefecture, the part of Japan hit hardest by the giant storm last March. More than 11,000 people in this region were reported missing or dead after the disaster. Inside the trailer were also some golf clubs, camping equipment and tools. Mark has no idea who the owner is, let alone if he or she survived. But the Japanese consulate in Vancouver is trying to find the person using the licence plate number.
Though it’s crazy that the container still held all those items, it’s not entirely surprising. The Kuroshio current follows a pretty direct path from the east coast of Japan to these Canadian Islands. The motorcycle is probably not the last prize left to be discovered; there was an estimated five million tons of debris washed into the ocean as a result of the tsunami, much of it still heading North America’s way. [CBC News]
Image: Peter Mark/CBC