A beachcomber on British Columbia’s Haida Gwaii islands has discovered what may be the first piece of debris from the Japanese tsunami to arrive in Canada.
Peter Mark was riding his ATV, exploring an isolated beach on Graham Island on April 18, when he made a spectacular find.
“You just never know what you’re going to stumble upon when you go for a drive, and lo and behold you just come across something that’s out of this world,” he said.
Mark found a large white cube, like the back part of a moving truck, just below the high tide mark.
“The door was ripped off it and I could see a motorcycle tire sticking out,” he said. “So I went closer and looked inside and saw a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.”
The bike was rusty, particularly on the wheels and handlebars, but the logo on the fuel tank was unmistakable.
“First I thought, this has got to be the craziest thing anyone has ever found,” he said.
“Then I looked a little closer and the licence had Japanese writing on it. The wall of the trailer had Japanese print on the tags. And the first thing that popped into my head was this is likely from the Tsunami in Japan.”
The motorcycle’s licence plate shows it was registered in Miyagi Prefecture, and writing on the container matches photos of a commonly used Japanese moving van.
Miyagi Prefecture was the worst hit part of Japan, with more than 11,000 people dead and missing. Video taken at the time of the tsunami shows numerous white trucks, similar to the cube that washed up on Haida Gwaii, getting washed away.
The Kuroshio ocean current runs in an almost direct path from Japan’s east coast over to North America, passing right by the islands of Haida Gwaii.
More than 1.5 million tonnes of tsunami debris is drifting across the Pacific Ocean toward Canada’s West Coast, but until now only bottles, buoys and other small items have washed ashore.
CBC 2012