Richard West, a 35-year-old fisherman from Plymouth, England, was hauling in a net about 20 miles south of Penzance in 2024 when a Lego shark came up with the catch, per UPI. It was the first shark recovered from a shipment that included 51,800 of them.
The shark had been missing since Feb. 13, 1997, in what became known as the Great Lego Spill, when the container ship Tokio Express was hit by a rogue wave about 20 miles off Land’s End in Cornwall. The ship tilted about 60 degrees one way and 40 the other, and 62 containers went overboard, according to SurferToday. It was sailing from Rotterdam to New York, per Live Science.
One of the lost containers held 4,756,940 Lego pieces, per UPI. Many were destined for sea-themed sets, including about 418,000 flippers, 97,500 scuba tanks and 4,200 octopuses, according to SurferToday. The Marine Conservation Society counted 33,427 black dragons.
Lego issued a “finders keepers” statement, and no organized recovery followed, per SurferToday. Live Science says 3,178,807 of the pieces were light enough to float. Others sank, and fishermen still pull Lego up in deep-water trawls, according to researchers at the University of Plymouth.
Tracey Williams, a beachcomber who moved to Cornwall in 2010, began cataloguing the finds on social media, which became the Lego Lost at Sea project. “I was amazed that it was still washing up after all that time,” she told Live Science.
Another 2024 find went to a 13-year-old boy, who found one of the roughly 4,200 octopuses, which SurferToday calls the “holy grail” of the lost pieces. Lego from the spill has also washed up in Belgium, the Netherlands and Ireland, among other places, according to the Irish Star.
Much of it may still be at sea, or may even be buried under sand. The Plymouth researchers write that during a March 2020 storm, a dune collapsed at Perran Sands and beachcombers found hundreds of pieces from the spill.
Meanwhile, ocean cleanup elsewhere has gone wrong in other places. In 1972, Florida fishermen sank 2 million old tires off Fort Lauderdale to build a reef; damaging the real reefs instead, and by 2009 only 73,000 had been recovered.
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