Boy finds ‘holy grail’ Lego octopus on beach 26 years after it fell into sea
A beachcomber has hit a jackpot after finding a rare piece of Lego that fell into the sea off a cargo ship during a storm in 1997.
The teenage treasure hunter has found almost 800 pieces of Lego that spilled into the sea after the accident.
Liutauras Cemolonskas, 13, searched for the octopus piece for two years before finally spotting it among washed-up jumble on a beach in Marazion, Cornwall.
He told PA he was ‘happy’ to discover the small toy – one of almost 5,000,000 pieces of Lego that tipped into the ocean in the 1997 ‘Great Lego Spill’ after a rogue wave hit a cargo ship near the Cornish coast.
Other plastic ended up in the sea alongside the Lego, including 352,000 pairs of flippers, 97,500 scuba tanks, and 92,400 swords.
However, the octopuses are the most prized objects as only 4,200 were onboard the ship.
Liutauras, who lives in Cornwall, said he regularly visits the local beaches with his parents as he hunts for the rare Lego.
He has beachcombed 789 Lego pieces in just two years along with fossils.
Dad Vytautas Cemolonskas, 36, said: ‘We’ve been looking for that octopus for two years, it’s not easy to find.
‘We were not expecting to find it at all because it’s very rare.
‘I was interested in archaeology when I was a kid and later Liutauras started doing [beachcombing] too, so we were always just doing it together as a family.’
His next goal is to find one of the 33,941 dragons that were inside the 62 cargo shipping containers that fell into the sea in the accident 20 miles off Land’s End.
Lego Lost At Sea
Other beachcombers and visitors alike continue to search for the Lego across beaches in the area.
One of them is Tracey Williams who launched the Lego Lost At Sea project which has spent years finding the toys since the accident.
She told PA it was ‘quite exciting’ that a second Lego octopus was found two days after Liutauras’s discovery in Porthleven.
She explained: ‘I think that’s because we had a very high spring tide coupled with strong onshore winds and when the two collide, the waves eat into the dunes that then release a lot of the plastic that has washed up.
‘I think there’s something quite magical about the octopuses.
‘They’re often seen as the holy grail of finds from that shipping container.’
Tracey collected the Lego pieces near her parents’ home shortly after the accident and ‘forgot about the story’ until she moved to Cornwall in 2010 and began spotting them again.
She said: ‘I found one octopus back in 1997 and I didn’t find another for 18 years.
‘I think people do love to find a bit of Lego when they’re doing a beach clean and many see it as as a reward for all the work they’ve put into cleaning the beaches.’
Tracey has been working on research related to the cargo spill and wrote a book about the accident called Adrift: The Curious Tale Of The Lego Lost At Sea.
She also runs popular social media accounts dedicated to highlighting the toy scavengers’ finds.
‘I’m recording where it all washes up so we’re working on a map that will form part of a scientific paper to show how far plastic from a cargo spill drifts and what happens to it over time,’ she said.
‘What we’d like to find out is whether those containers still exist or whether they’ve long since rusted away.
‘I mean, it’s intriguing to know what’s happened to all the rest of the Lego that we’ve never seen.
‘There are so many cargoes spilled every year, but you very rarely hear what happens to the goods inside and what we know from the Lego story is that 27-year-old plastic that was inside that shipping container is still being found.’
She said the cargo spill is ‘part whimsical, part doom-laden.’
Collecting the Legos ‘started as a bit of fun and it gradually opened my eyes to how much plastic was in the ocean,’ she added.
Lego is made to be durable, with research suggesting it could survive in the ocean for up to 1,300 years.
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