Kate Dittmer, 12, was pretty realistic about the chances of her ducky making it to shore first.
“It’s a 1-in-4,000 chance, so who knows,” said Dittmer, who volunteered to be one of the scoopers this year as ducks washed up to shore.
Her duck, named “C-Diddy,” after her mom Christine, was just one of about 4,000 released from the top of the Huntington Beach Pier from two large skip loaders on Saturday afternoon and into the water.  
The annual “Duck-a-thon,” now in its 16th year, raises money for the Huntington Beach Community Clinic, where uninsured patients can get care.
Kim Jones, a volunteer from the clinic, stood with a megaphone near the sign-up tables and shouted out the countdown for the 2:30 p.m. duck deadline.
“It’s so much fun,” she said. “The whole family can enjoy it, and it’s for a good cause.”

Jones said in the early years of the Duck-a-thon, there were so few ducks purchased that they just used a few laundry baskets to throw them over the pier. These days, the big skip loaders are used.
As the release time of 3 p.m. approached, thousands of spectators lined the pier and the sand to watch as the rubber duckies were released.
Pam Smith of Orange was pretty optimistic about her duck.
 “It’s gonna be a winner,” she said. 
Her fiancé Alex Collins - who named his duck Pam - said it was all about his duck coming in before hers. 
“We always have a competition going, on one thing or another,” he said.
When the ducks finally took the plunge, the crowd cheered. Then the thousands of yellow ducks slowly migrated southbound under the pier toward a surf competition, and seemed to be stuck in whitewash for a bit. 
Volunteers wearing yellow vests with the word “DUCKS” on them scanned the ocean intensely for the first crop to come in. The first 65 or so ducks to make it to shore won a prize. As more came to shore, the helpers scrambled to grab them and load them back into a truck.
Volunteer Alex Lewis, 12, said they came in pretty fast this time.
“One year, they were headed all the way to Catalina.”

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