That mysterious floating object near Everett? It’s a prototype

EVERETT — Numerous sightings have been reported of a meandering white thing being tugged around the Puget Sound area.

Speculation has blown up on social media about the unidentified floating object.

The 200-foot tubular thing, it turns out, has a name.

It is called Ocean-2 and was created by Panthalassa, a startup based in Portland, Oregon, with a goal of creating clean, cheap energy in the middle of the ocean.

Ocean-2 is a prototype for a renewable energy capture buoy.

“We’ve been out running a sea trial for three weeks, so this buoy is just coming back now,” Panthalassa cofounder Garth Sheldon-Coulson told The Daily Herald on Tuesday. “It’s just hanging out until we put it back on a barge and bring it back to Portland.”

It likely won’t meander these waters anymore. On Tuesday, it was dockside in Everett as it prepared to depart early next week. There aren’t any plans for it to return.

The buoy is horizontal while in transit, as local viewers saw it.

“It is turned off,” Sheldon-Coulson said. “When in operation it is vertical, the bulbous part is at the top at the surface of the water, and the rest goes underneath the water in a straight up and down vertical orientation.”

The big top is about 30 feet.

The sea trial was in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, as it was with Ocean-1, a smaller version deployed from Port Angeles in 2021.

“It is designed to operate far from shore,” Sheldon-Coulson said. “It sits in the ocean and turns energy from the ocean waves into very low-cost energy using simple, reliable technologies.”

Panthalassa employs about 70 people, from backgrounds including aerospace, research universities, naval architecture, software companies, metal fabricators and the armed forces.

“We’ve been working for about eight years,” Sheldon-Coulson said. “The first four to five years were just R&D. Now we’re moving forward to commercialization.”

Ocean-3 is in development now.

Watching the mysterious white object loll in the water was more interesting than the first half of the Super Bowl to Bill Rucker and his friends on Sunday.

“Everyone speculated what it might be,” Rucker said. “One thought it was a big white sailboat that capsized. Someone speculated that it was a communications tower that was being towed to where it could be erected.

“Then all of a sudden it was being pulled toward downtown,” he added. “Sort of like the game where nothing happened, then all of a sudden everything happened.”

Andrea Brown: 425-339-3443; abrown@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @reporterbrown.