A marker buoy that washed ashore in Co Wexford this week has been traced to as far away as the US state of Louisiana.
The large metal buoy was found on Wednesday (3 April) on the coast at Ballymoney near Gorey by local man Owen J Dunbar, who discovered that despite its dilapidated condition it still bore the name of its manufacturer, Wet Tech.
Dunbar contacted the company by email and received a swift reply from operations manager Todd Carl, who not only confirmed the marker buoy was one of theirs but also provided more details about its origins.
The buoy was manufactured in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast region of the US, and had been moored in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico as a marker on an oil platform downed by the storm.
Carl believes the buoy broke its moorings in 2007 as it was recorded as missing during a regular service check, and as it was not fitted with a GPS transmitter its whereabouts were unknown.
It’s now presumed that over the last 17 years, the buoy drifted out of the gulf into the Atlantic and was caught in the Gulf Stream — indeed, it may have circled the North Atlantic more than once over the years before it beached in Wexford this week.