The US Coast Guard found 16,000 pounds of cocaine on a homemade submarine in late July, but they didn’t confiscate it all. Of those eight tons of cocaine, the Coast Guard took only six, leaving two tons on the vessel — in order to make it easier to tow. If all the cocaine had been removed, the Coast Guard assessed it would have been difficult to balance the vessel during the tow.
But cocaine’s reputation for keeping people up doesn’t transfer well to seagoing vessels. The insubstantial sub, larded with the two remaining tons of drugs, sank. Anyone looking to recover the contraband will need to dive 13,000 feet down in the Pacific south of Mexico to find it. The Coast Guard ship that stopped the sub knows a bit about staying afloat: the cutter called the Stratton, a 418-foot vessel, had holes in its own hull just six months after it was delivered in 2012.
