FOR THE SEVENTH TIME IN THE PAST TWO YEARS a human foot clad in a “sneaker” style shoe has washed ashore along the Pacific coastline in British Columbia. The Times Colonist is reporting:
Two men walking on the beach Tuesday found what appeared to be a foot inside a size 81⁄2 Nike running shoe. The shoe was white but dirty.
RCMP photo
Members of the Richmond RCMP seized the shoe and its contents and turned them over to the B.C. Coroners Service, where a forensic autopsy confirmed the remains were human, police said.
“There’s no indication if it’s a male or female as of yet,” coroner Jeff Dolan said yesterday. “At first glance, it doesn’t match any of the other feet.”
Five of the first six were all right feet, and five of them were males. Firegeezer started covering these stories in February, 2008, and we’ve been watching the developments since then. It has been a semi-mystery for the constabulary, but not suspicious yet. It is not at all unusual for human remains to come ashore from the ocean, as people are constantly lost at sea for various reasons. But the fact that all of the parts showing up at B. C. were feet inside of sneakers makes it interesting.
On May 26, 2008, we wrote:
And once again we are treated to some unique opinion from retired professor of oceanography Curtis Ebbesmeyer who is an “expert on floating objects.” After the first three feet were found, the RCMP and the B. C. coroner contacted Ebbesmeyer for advice.
Prof. Ebbesmeyer had a chance to study the issue when 61,000 pairs of Nike sneakers fell into the sea from a container ship in Alaskan waters in 1990. The shoes drifted to parts of the Canadian coast including the Queen Charlotte Islands, off B.C.’s north coast and as far south as Washington and Oregon.
Running shoes float upside down protecting the remains inside from birds but leaving them open to the attention of fish and other water animals, he said. Friday he further enlightened us when he said left shoes and right shoes often tend to wash up at different times at different places because they float differently.
He added that there are beaches that collect mostly rights and others that collect mostly lefts because the winds or currents sort out left and right foot wear. (I am NOT making this up! …. FG)
As Sherlock Holmes would say to Dr. Watson, “The game is certainly afoot.”
Today’s story from the Times Colonist detailing this latest find is HERE.
Read the earlier stories from Firegeezer HERE, HERE, and HERE.
