Last week, organizers announced that the enormously popular Tall Ships festival will return to the Port of Duluth, Minnesota in the summer of 2016. In teasing the event, promoters said there would be some kind of “special surprise” as part of Tall Ships 2016.
My thought at the time was that this must be some kind of floating object, probably a ship.
But there was another clue embedded in the promotional materials, namely that the “surprise” would turn the harbor into “a giant bathtub.”
Most would have left it at that. After all, if you can’t trust public relations firms to choose just the right moment to reveal a surprise, who can you trust? Especially when the clue is as enthralling as this one. I mean, could it be a giant bar of soap. A floating bathtub full of naked Midwesterners? I couldn’t dare venture a guess because …
Aaaaahrgh! I can’t do this anymore.
This giant rubber duck was in Pittsburgh in 2013. (PHOTO: Mark Dixon, Flickr Creative Commons).
Specifically, it’s a giant, rubber duck that has appeared as an attraction in port cities around the world. There are updated version of this duck (kind of like Iron Man), which is important because the duck in Taiwan exploded before it was repaired and sent to Nanming Province in China only to be washed away by floods.
No one has confirmed to me that it’s a duck. I have deduced this. If it’s not a duck, I’ll have to eat crow. I figured better to post a picture of a giant duck on the internet and apologize later than to ask permission to post a picture of a giant duck on the internet.
One can imagine that seeing this duck pass under the Aerial Lift Bridge would be an iconic image of our life and times.
NICE CALL…just saw official FB post on Tall Ships Duluth page about an hour ago…Still hoping it might stop off ‘down here’ in Bay City, Michigan on the way… Hoping you all have fun.