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In 60 years of scouring the gnarled shores of Canada's western fringe, Neil and Betty Carey have salvaged just about every strange thing that will float.

There were the empty survival suit, the closet's worth of Japanese shoes, the whale carcasses and the Coast Guard rescue dummy - all washed up along the Queen Charlotte Islands, which intercept and strain the great spin cycle of Pacific currents like a giant colander.

In and around their home in Sandspit, B.C., the Careys have pack-ratted about 4,000 glass fishing floats and numerous messages in bottles from schoolchildren, cruise ship passengers and lovesick sailors.

But in all that time, the couple have never come across the human body part that, for the past eight months, has perplexed beachcombers and police alike.

"We once found a dead man down on Vancouver Island," says Mr. Carey, a U.S. Navy veteran. "But a human foot, that's a new one on me."

Since August of last year, three severed right feet, all shod in running shoes, have swept up on B.C. beaches. The RCMP have launched an investigation but are offering few clues about the path these feet took from appendage to flotsam.

The story of the floating feet is just one more riddle in a part of the world where mysteries wash up daily. The detectives in these cases are people like Mr. and Mrs. Carey, members of a large network of coastal foragers, many of whom will search stormy beaches by lamp and moonlight if the currents and climate portend a bountiful enough tide.

They show up by the thousands at west-coast beachcombing conferences, and subscribe to Beachcombers' Alert, a quarterly review of strange flotsam stories. For them, beachcombing is no leisurely diversion. Each and every piece of debris - human remains included - is key to understanding the complex gyre of global ocean currents that confounds science still.

"They're the kind of people who'll wake up in the middle of the night and rush down to the beach because they hear a particular west wind that brings the flotsam ashore," says Beachcombers' Alert editor Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle oceanographer who acts as chief investigator in these oceanic puzzles, collecting tips from all over the world to fill in the world map of ocean currents.

At a beachcombers' conference last weekend in Ocean Shores, Wash., more than 1,000 devoted flotsam collectors from the United States and Canada trolled booths selling curious debris and lined up to ask Dr. Ebbesmeyer about their strangest finds.

"It felt a little like Antiques Roadshow," said Dr. Ebbesmeyer.

Among the most alarming items he appraised were dozens of strange Thermos-like bottles that had landed on beaches from California to Washington State. Realizing they were old fumigant bottles that once held toxic substances used to kill rodents and other pests aboard grain ships, Dr. Ebbesmeyer warned everyone to avoid them. "People were opening and sniffing these bottles," he says. "In Holland, they closed entire beaches when these things started washing up. Someone out there is doing something very wrong. They are washing up by the hundreds."

One of Dr. Ebbesmeyer's most reliable detectives is Brian Gisborne, a former commercial fisherman in Victoria who runs a water taxi to the West Coast Trail and pilots marine survey teams up the treacherous west coast of Vancouver Island.

"There's not much of this coast I haven't walked or climbed over," he says by cellphone off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Even while navigating a two-metre groundswell that threatens to dash his aluminum boat against craggy cliffs, Mr. Gisborne is eager to talk beachcombing.

"Timing is everything," he says. "The first thing I buy in the new year is a tide book. You have to keep track of the jet stream, the weather, the tides at all times. I could predict with very good accuracy when we should be ready this year ... but here I'm talking about things I spent a lifetime figuring out. I wouldn't want to give too much away."

Like Mr. Gisborne, most flotsam collectors use little more than a tide book, a weather report and a pair of comfy shoes to ply their hobby, though some go to more extreme lengths.

"You'll sometimes see helicopters flying low and slow over the shores looking for items," says Mr. Carey, who at age 85 doesn't get out to browse the shoreline as much as he used to.

The most bountiful tides usually rumble in between September and March, when the north-running Davidson Current surges from California to the Queen Charlotte Islands, bringing with it a garbage dump of debris that's been circling the Pacific Rim for up to 60 years.

The antiques Mr. Gisborne has plucked off the beach include a Second World War-era mine, whale harpoons, vintage aircraft wreckage and a 25-year-old message in a bottle tossed by an 83-year-old cruise ship passenger. "I tried tracking her down," says Mr. Gisborne, "but of course she's pushing daisies now."

Messages in bottles are common along the western seashores, he says. "They're usually merchant ship officers who say something like, 'I'm a single guy on a tanker coming up with a load of oil from California. It's two days after Christmas and we're out of women and out of wine. If you're either one, send yourself over.'"

The oldest flotsam often comes from the garbage patch, a mid-Pacific doldrums roughly the size of Alberta to which much of the world's floating junk gravitates. "It's the biggest dust bunny on the face of the Earth," says Dr. Ebbesmeyer.

When a strong Pineapple Express gusts east across the Pacific and straight through the garbage patch, beachcombers turn out by the thousands.

Over the years, Dr. Ebbesmeyer has relied on this coastal network to report landfalls of hockey gloves, rubber duckies and running shoes (without feet), many of which emerge from the 10,000 containers that fall off shipping vessels every year.

Legally, a beachcomber must report any finds to the Receiver of Wrecks, an officer of Transport Canada charged with reuniting lost marine property with its owner. In reality, most flotsam isn't valuable enough to bother reporting.

Tracking where and when the pieces of flotsam started their oceanic journeys has helped Dr. Ebbesmeyer model how everything from oil spills to corpses will bob about the globe.

He's looked into sombre discoveries before. On a recent trip to Matagorda, Tex., he found thousands of hard hats and orange life preservers left floating after Hurricane Katrina. In Tacoma, Wash., he mapped the 32-hour, 80-kilometre path of a man who'd committed suicide off the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. But he's never heard of anything quite like the case of the mystery feet.

"It's not that unusual to find feet," he says, "but they're not usually so similar. Several have been found along Florida and several along Texas. They detach from the rest of the body by a process called disarticulation."

They also have unique sailing characteristics. "Some beaches collect right shoes and others collect left shoes," says Dr. Ebbesmeyer, who's writing a book about his beachcombing experiences called The Floating World for HarperCollins.

"Once you get to know the floating world," he says, "the rest of the world makes a lot more sense. Things don't disappear; they just keep floating around and around."

*****

Hey, what's that in the water?

May, 1990: The vessel Hansa Carrier loses 21 shipping containers carrying 80,000 Nike shoes. Within six months, beachcombers from California to the Queen Charlotte Islands are wearing new shoes.

January, 1992: A container with tens of thousands of plastic ducks, beavers, turtles and frogs falls off a ship in the mid-Pacific. They later show up on beaches as far away as Scotland.

1997: Nearly five million Lego pieces en route from Europe to the United States tumble from a container ship. By 2020, they will have turned up on beaches throughout the northern hemisphere, according to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer.

Late 2006: South Carolinians take to the beaches in droves after thousands of bags of Doritos start washing ashore.

January, 2007: Foragers in England make off with exhaust pipes, beauty cream and 50 BMW motorcycles after 40 containers from the shipwrecked MSC Napoli wash ashore.

Patrick White