Tuesday, May 3, 2016

The fish and the anchor

While I was in Massachusetts last week, during a period of very strong northwest winds, Eric found some interesting fishing floats washed up on Salmon Creek Beach (on 26 April 2016).

Here's a close-up of one of them:

 

Eric had a hunch that the characters were Chinese.  And luckily, Evelyne was able to provide a translation. (Thanks, Evelyne!)

 The four large characters above the fish are:
海 丰 渔 塑 

Evelyne says the first two characters (from left to right) are the name of a coastal county — "Haifeng" — in southern China.

The third character means "fishery."

And the fourth character means "plastic."


Here's the second float.  Both floats were ~13 cm long.

 

We need to take a better picture of the characters below the anchor.  Then, if possible, I'll provide an update about the translation on this float.

There were also lots of other floats, buoys, and glass bottles.  Could this have been debris from an offshore fishing boat?
 
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7 comments:

  1. evelynekuoMay 4, 2016 at 3:23 AM

    The new one 浙江 is the name of the province "Zhejiang" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhejiang

    Always a pleasure to help from the other side of the Pacific! :)

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  2. Jackie SonesMay 4, 2016 at 6:55 AM

    Thanks, Evelyne! We'll take a better picture of the characters below the anchor today.

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  3. Dan GurneyMay 4, 2016 at 9:01 AM

    Very interesting. I've never seen floats like that before.

    I was out at the Jenner beach north of the mouth of the river yesterday. There was very little flotsam or jetsam washed ashore. There must be a lot of citizens out there picking up the beach.

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  4. GSSMay 4, 2016 at 9:08 AM

    Always something"floating " in the ocean

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  5. Jackie SonesMay 4, 2016 at 10:27 AM

    Yes, whenever we find floats like this, we can't help but wonder about their journeys. It would be amazing if they could record the path they took from China to California.

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  6. beachmamaMay 4, 2016 at 2:43 PM

    It's always fun to find things like this. On Doran I recently found an unusual heavy plastic fruit juice bottle from Japan and a couple of small 3" plastic floats with what appears to be Chinese characters. A client told us she found 14 glass balls on Salmon Creek after a heavy storm years ago . . .

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  7. PurslaneMay 4, 2016 at 3:57 PM

    It's fun to find that you are not the only buoy sleuth. https://www.reddit.com/r/translator/comments/1wxnfz/japanese_to_english_bouys/

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