Happened last year too where I live (Brighton) about 30 miles west. Another cargo ship got in to trouble in the channel and lost hundreds of tons of timber, the whole beach was basically a massive pile of 2x6 of various length. Unfortunately they set up a 24 hour beach patrol and arrested anyone caught with timber until they could get it cleaned up. There's archaic laws governing beach combing to do with proof of posession etc. They were doing people for theft because officially the wood still belonged to the ships owners.
A few years ago a cargo ship got in to trouble in rough seas in the channel and lost a whole load of containers. They were washing ip fir weeks and contained everything from nappies (daipers), canned goods, electrical equipment and BMW motorcycles. It was a field day for a while until they started arresting people under piracy laws. Officially anything found has to he declared and is only yours in a year if it can be proved that the owners had written it off or no longer wanted it back. It was hilarious what people were getting away with.
Traditionally, flotsam and jetsam are words that describe specific kinds of debris in the ocean. Historically the words had specific nautical meanings, with legal consequences, but in modern usage they came to mean any kind of marine debris.
There is a technical difference between the two: jetsam has been voluntarily cast into the sea (jettisoned) by the crew of a ship, usually in order to lighten it in an emergency; while flotsam describes goods that are floating on the water without having been thrown in deliberately, often after a shipwreck. Generally speaking, flotsam is the property of the finder, while jetsam remains the property of its original owner. Traditionally spelled flotsom and jetsom, the "o" was replaced with "a" in the early twentieth century, and the former spellings have since been out of common usage.
Ligan (or lagan), describes goods that have been marked by being tied to a buoy so that its owner can find and retrieve it later.
Derelict is property which has been abandoned and deserted at sea by those who were in charge without any hope of recovering it. This includes vessels and cargo.
The differences among flotsam, jetsam, and ligan are occasionally of consequence in the law of admiralty and marine salvage. On land the distinction between deliberate and accidental loss led to the concept of Treasure trove.One famous example of flotsam occurred in the Pacific Ocean in 1992, when thousands of rubber ducks and other toys manufactured by The First Years corporation went overboard during a storm. The rubber ducks were scattered across three oceans (the Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic), and many have been found; Curtis Ebbesmeyer and other scientists have used the incident to gain a better understanding of ocean currents. Similar incidents have happened, with the same potential to track currents, with containers of Nike sneakers. On November 30, 2006, thousands of bags of Doritos chips washed up on the beach at Frisco, North Carolina
