A human foot in a hiking boot recently washed ashore on the banks of the Salish Sea in British Columbia. It is the 14th “disarticulated” foot that has washed ashore in a shoe or boot on the Salish Sea in Canada since 2007. If you include the shores of Washington State, the number of floating feet rises to 19. 

What is going on? Are the feet from victims of organized crime or a drug cartel? Is there a mass murderer with a foot-fetish? Probably not. Apparently, it is not unusual for a decomposing human body in seawater to come apart at the joints over time. A foot in a running shoe might have the right match of weight and volume to allow it to float. A modern shoe could become like a tiny lifejacket for a separate foot. 

A lack of evidence of foul play supports the theory that the feet naturally “disarticulated,” which is to say separated naturally. In 2017, the Guardian reported: 

In the past dozen cases, the provincial coroner’s office has ruled out foul play, noting that none of the feet showed signs of trauma. They have identified eight of the feet, saying they included two pairs, and determined that the remaining lone feet belonged to men.

All of the individuals either killed themselves or died accidentally, with their feet naturally coming apart from their bodies during decomposition, said the coroner.

The floating feet have been washing up on shore for at least eleven years and have averaged fewer than 2 feet per year. The number has not been increasing. We posted about the floating feet in 2011, when there 11 cases in both British Columbia and Washington State. In the intervening 7 years, an additional 8 shoe clad feet have washed ashore representing just slightly more than one per year. 

There is one other factor which may be in play here. The Salish Sea is not a large and wide body of water like the Mediterranean Sea, for example. The Salish Sea is a network of coastal waterways that includes the southwestern portion of the Canadian province of British Columbia and the northwestern portion of the U.S. state of Washington. Its major bodies of water are the Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound. It reaches from Desolation Sound at the north end of the Strait of Georgia to Oakland Bay at the head of Hammersley Inlet at the south end of Puget Sound.

There are two key points here. First, there are quite a few people living on and around the Salish Sea, who have the opportunity to die after falling or jumping into the many waterways. The second point is that if a foot is separated and floating in a shoe, the Salish Sea has a vast length of shoreline, almost 5,000 miles, for the floating foot to wash up on.