There was the most amazing story in the paper yesterday morning about A DOG IN POLAND WHO WAS RESCUED FROM THE BALTIC SEA! Mom and I were very excited to read this story, and then we looked for more information online, and we found some. We also found some photos of the dog, and these photos belong to the Associated Press, so I don't know if it's okay to use them or not. But probably not. Anyway, if I get sent to jail, I hope there will be a computer there that I can use to keep writing my blog!
So here's the story of what happened. Somehow this dog got out on an ice floe, which is what you call a chunk of ice that is smaller than an iceberg but bigger than an ice cube, and started floating down the Vistula River in Poland. No one knows where the dog came from or when it started its float trip, but some people in a town called Grudziadz saw the dog on Saturday.
Grudziadz is about 60 miles from the sea. Some firefighters there tried to rescue the dog, but they couldn't do it. This was probably because there was so much ice in the river, and also the river is pretty wide, which you can see by looking at this photo that was taken of the Vistula from Grudziadz. Except that this photo was taken in summer, when there wasn't any ice.
So the dog kept on floating downstream, and the weather was really, really cold, like sometimes it was 20 degrees below zero! And the only reason the dog didn't freeze to death was because he had thick fur. If he had been a polar bear, he could have just got off the ice floe and gone swimming in the river. Polar bears are good swimmers, and they have very thick fur, and they like hanging out on ice floes. But dogs don't generally like ice floes, so this dog probably realized that he had made a terrible mistake by getting on the ice in the first place, and I'll bet he was really scared.
Finally, the dog floated all the way to the Baltic Sea, and he floated like 15 miles out into the sea, and some scientists who were on a Polish ship saw him on Monday and they rescued him. Except it wasn't easy for them to rescue the dog because he kept falling off the ice floe, and the scientists were afraid he would drown, but then he would come back up again. So then one of the men got in a pontoon boat thing and he managed to get hold of the dog and drag him into the boat and save his life.
The boat crew dried off the dog and warmed him up and fed him, and he was very friendly and grateful to them. They named him "Baltic," because they found him in the Baltic Sea and also the name of their ship is the
Baltic. The company that owns the ship sent him a nice squeaky toy and a dog dish and some dog food. Then a veterinarian checked Baltic all over and she said that he was in very good condition, even though he had been floating around on the ice for several days.
The President of Poland, Mr. Lech Kaczynski, sent a letter to the crew of the ship. And even though he has one of those funny Polish names that are hard to say and spell, we know that he is a good person because he is a dog owner. So in the letter, he said that the men on the ship were very good people because they saved the dog, and that "Such gestures make our world a better one."
There are some people who have said that Baltic is their dog, but when they came to meet him, Baltic didn't act like he knew them. If the real owner of Baltic doesn't come to get him, the ship's crew is going to adopt him, so we know that he will have a good home. And that makes this story have a very happy ending!
