In January 1992, a storm knocked containers off a cargo ship in the North Pacific, and 28,800 bath toys went overboard: yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles and green frogs. The first ones reached Alaska ten months later. They kept turning up for years, and oceanographers used them to learn how the sea moves.
Click anywhere to spill 28,800 ducks there. The shading shows where they are likely to be, two months at a time, for 10 years. The odds come from decades of satellite-tracked drifting buoys: how often a buoy in one spot turned up in another two months later. The big duck follows the largest crowd.
Many end up in a garbage patch, one of the slow, giant whirlpools in the open ocean where currents gather whatever floats. Today that is mostly plastic.
This shows where floating things tend to go, not a forecast. Wind, waves and beaching are not in it, and "near a coast" means within about 150 km of land. Drift data from plasticadrift.org (van Sebille, England & Froyland, 2012).