Anecdotal evidence indicates that the available data on rubber duckies is suspect and shouldn't be used for modeling purposes. This video is probably the best source of real rubber ducking information.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf9d7rSf_Ks&feature=relatedWhile rubber ducky races of from 10,000 to 250,000 participants are documented there is no hard data on performance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duckNote also in the above link, quoted below, that the performance of rubber duckies in sea water seems much greater than fresh water but everybody just accepts this without asking the critical question "why?".
During a Pacific storm on January 10, 1992, three 40-foot containers holding 29,000 Friendly Floatees plastic bath toys from a Chinese factory were washed off a ship.[3] Two-thirds of the ducks floated south and landed three months later on the shores of Indonesia, Australia, and South America. The remaining 10,000 ducks headed north to Alaska and then completed a full circle back near Japan, caught up in the North Pacific Gyre current as the so called Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Many of the ducks then entered the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia and were trapped in the Arctic ice. They moved through the ice at a rate of one mile per day, and in 2000 they were sighted in the North Atlantic. The movement of the ducks had been monitored by American oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer.If you imagine the flat bottom of the rubber duckie as a skateboard, and ocean waves as a skateboard park half pipe, it's clear that the rubber duckie would simply go back and force without any real progress. Clearly anybody can see that modeling rubber duckies is just an exercise in promoting personal prejudices since the data doesn't even come close to what's in the video. You can talk about wind all day but we don't have wind in the arenas or even waves. Any rubber duckies, excepting the evil con mission rubber duckies, would obviously just be sitting ducks.
