No ducks

As there is currently something like an international craze for rubber duck races, of course the city of Vienna didn't want to be left out, so a big duck race took place on the Danube Canal yesterday. Or was supposed to take place yesterday. Haldur and I bought our rubber ducks — nos. 13060 and 13803 respectively, two of 20,000 ducks to participate — and entered them in the contest. And that's the last we ever heard of them.

Fig. 1: Duck race start, people waiting, no ducks.

The race was supposed to start here, at Heiligenstädter Brücke, yesterday at 6 pm. Two lorries containing the ducks were parked on the bridge, ready to dump them into the water. But for all we know they never did.

Five minutes to six, a man with a megaphone appeared on the bridge, and produced a variety of croaking and totally unintelligible sounds. Miraculously, some of the other people sitting there semed to understand him. Apparently, a ship was scheduled to sail down the Danube Canal in ten minutes or so, and they had to let it pass through before they could start the race. They expected to start the race at 6:15.

At 6:15, there was no sign of any ship, but the croaking megaphone man reappeared and said something about a delay of ten more minutes.

At 6:25 the ship still had not appeared, but the megaphone voice enthusiastically reported that the ship was due any minute now, and the duck race would start in five minutes.

Fifteen (!) minutes later, there was still no ship, and the megaphone man had also disappeared. Haldur got increasingly more grumpy, so I packed him on my bicycle, and we left. For some reason, while I was cycling back, I had this melody (AAC, 4.1 MB) stuck in my head, only the lyrics seemed to have changed to "no ducks", where they used to be something else.

So instead of posting pictures of the duck race on the Danube Canal, all I can offer you is pictures of the Danube Canal without ducks and pictures of people waiting for the ducks.

Fig. 2: Municipial garbage incinerator, no ducks.

Fig. 3: People waiting, no ducks.

Fig. 4: People waiting on the Döbling footbridge, no ducks.

Whatever happened to ducks no. 13060 and 13803 I don't know. I don't even know who won the prizes, for the official duck race home page still has no results. Perhaps the race didn't even take place, even though there are fairly blurry (probably photoshopped) pictures of it on the Radio Wien website.

Update: The blurry pictures have now been replaced with better ones. They could still be photoshopped though.

If anybody finds out something about the whereabouts of our ducks, please inform us.