After two years of searching, Liutauras finally found the plastic octopus on Marazion beach. The piece was one of many lost from the freighter Tokyo Express at Land’s End in 1997, when a ferocious wave knocked 62 containers into the sea. There were approximately 4,200 Lego octopuses on board the ship at the time.
The teenager, who regularly visits the beach with his parents, said he was “delighted” by the discovery. Liutauras has collected almost 800 Lego blocks from 1997. His father, Vytautas, notes that an octopus is not easy to find. Among the other lost pieces were 352,000 pairs of fins, 97,500 diving tanks and 92,400 swords. Liutauras has now set his sights on finding one of the 33,941 dragons that fell into the sea in the incident.
Beachcomber Tracey Williams is part of the Lego Lost At Sea project, which has been working for years to find the plastic pieces since they ended up in the ocean. She often considers the octopus the “holy grail” of all finds and says she found one in 1997 and only found one again after 18 years. “There’s something magical about octopuses,” she says.
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