A beach. A sign. A mystery. An answer.

Hurricane Sandy made landfall  on the Jersey Shore town of Brielle in October 2012.Homes filled with water. Boats washed up on people’s lawns and on the Brielle Avenue bridge.

Also, a real estate sign went missing.

It had been planted in back of a house for sale on Cedarcrest Drive. The sign was 48 by 63 cm and about 3 cm thick and made of plastic composite. It disappeared along with the post it was mounted to and was never seen again.

Until around May 14, 2018.

On a beach in France, 3,595 miles away.

A man walking along the Plage du Pin Sec, near Bordeaux, spotted it. The faded sign was missing a chunk, but he could still read the legend “Diane Turton Realtors 732-292-1400.”

 “It was curious,” said the man, Hannes Frank, 64, a semiretired software consultant who lives in Brussels.

He sent an email to Diane Turton Realtors: “Hi, Just wanted to let you know that I found part of one of your signposts washed up on the beach near Bordeaux France pictures available if wanted. Not in best shape after that crossing.”

Perry Beneduce, the company’s marketing director, received the email. “I initially thought this has to be a prank,” he said. But Mr. Beneduce happened to have been the manager of the Diane Turton branch in Wall, N.J., when the hurricane hit.  “It was the only sign from that office that went missing,” he said.

An oceanographer who studies the drift of floating objects, Curtis Ebbesmeyer,  said that judging by how long it took, the sign was probably on its third crossing of the Atlantic when it beached.

 There is a great circulating ocean current that runs from New Jersey to northern Europe down to Spain and back to New Jersey and takes 3.3 years on average, and it takes about a year and a half to drift across the North Atlantic one way from New Jersey to France,” said Mr. Ebbesmeyer.

 “So five and a half years is just about right.”

Over the centuries, Mr. Ebbesmeyer said, thousands of pieces of man-made stuff, including Columbus’s ships, have followed the same watery circuit that links the East Coast and Europe: eastward on the Gulf Stream, south on the Portugal Current, west on the North Atlantic Equatorial Current, back up the East Coast on the Gulf Stream. He knew of a 2003 political campaign sign, about the same size as the Diane Turton sign, that departed Newfoundland, Canada, and landed in Cornwall, England, in 2007.

“What you have is a low-windage object,” he said. “It floats flat in the water. Typically those travel about seven miles a day.”

“I’m always trying to find data that give me better estimates of the orbital period,” Mr. Ebbesmeyer said. “This is really good scientific data.”

The real estate office now hopes to get the sign back to frame it as a memento.
Up to 233 people died when Hurricane Sandy tore a path through the Caribbean and America's east coast in 2012.

Before hitting New Jersey and New York the storm affected the Greater Antilles, the Bahamas and Bermuda.

From The New York Times (edited)