2 tons of cocaine, 1 whale-stranded sailor: Coast Guard cutter’s haul

A U.S. Coast Guard cutter returned to its Port Angeles, Washington, homeport on Friday after plucking very different items from the middle of the Pacific Ocean during its 54-day sailing.

On April 19, the ship recovered $50 million worth of cocaine while patrolling off the coast of Mexico.

A week earlier, it had rescued a lone sailor left adrift after an unfortunate meeting with a whale on the high seas.

The cutter, called the Active, routinely patrols against drug smuggling off the coasts of Central and South America. Following an hour-long high-speed chase about 500 miles south of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, the Active’s helicopter shot out the engines of a speedboat attempting to deliver 1.9 tons of cocaine from Ecuador.

Operations officer Lt. Erick Jackson said the helicopter had spotted two pangas — small, low-riding boats, each with three outboard motors for speed — signaling each other just after dawn.

“Knowing that we were in a spot that typically sees a lot of drug smuggling, we immediately launched our two ‘interceptor’ small boats with law enforcement teams on each boat,” Jackson said.

The pangas, able to hit speeds of about 45 miles per hour, fled.

The Coast Guard boats pursued, broadcasting loud warnings for the pangas to stop: "¡Alto su barco! ¡Guardacostas Estados Unidos, alto su barco!”

“We conducted warning shots from the surface assets and disabling fire from a precision marksman that is stationed on the helicopter, who physically shot the engines out in one of the vessels, and the other became compliant after the warning shots,” Jackson said.

Six alleged smugglers, two from Ecuador and four from Mexico, were arrested.

A Coast Guard spokesperson said the cocaine was densely packed in cubes of black plastic and burlap, about the size of three large refrigerators when all stacked together.

Almost 2,000 tons of cocaine was produced globally in 2020, more than double the amount in 2014, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Roughly half the global supply reaches drug users, and half is seized by authorities, according to the U.N.

Three-fourths of cocaine reaching the United States is shipped by boats from South America, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

White House Office of National Drug Control Policy director Rahul Gupta told Reuters in March that fighting the cocaine trade remains a priority even as synthetic opioids like fentanyl take a much higher toll on American lives. Opioids were involved in three times more drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2021 than cocaine was, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite decades of anti-narcotic efforts, Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru remain major cocaine producers, with boats from Ecuador carrying much of the product to Mexico, where it typically continues overland to the north.

Adrift on the high seas after hitting a whale

While on patrol, the Active also received a distress call from a man attempting to sail alone from Panama to Tahiti.

The experienced sailor’s GPS device sent up a distress call when he was 300 miles northwest of the Galapagos Islands.

“It's a very desolate area of ocean. There's not a lot out there,” Jackson said.

The Active was 200 miles away and made a 14-hour detour to rescue the sailor, 57-year-old Thomas Stremler of Germany.

According to Jackson, Stremler told the Coast Guard he had sailed into a pod of sleeping whales, apparently humpbacks. He hit one with his homemade trimaran, called the Chantelle in Berlin.

“For lack of a better term, he ran aground on a whale,” Jackson said. “He reported the whale was uninjured.”

The whale then dove, and its tail flukes broke the homemade sailboat’s starboard outrigger, one of the boat’s two horizontal stabilizers.

Stremler attempted to replace the outrigger with his sailboat’s second mast, but the new outrigger would not stay in place, and the boat would not sail straight.

“He was understandably emotional to see his vessel disappear in the distance as we left scene,” Jackson said.

Coast Guard crew members marked the small wooden boat with spray paint and left it adrift with a light on to reduce the risk of another vessel running into it.

Thirteen days later, the Active dropped Stremler off in San Diego.

KUOW’s efforts to contact Stremler were unsuccessful.

Correction, 4:45 p.m., 5/9/24: An earlier version overstated the weight of cocaine intercepted by the Coast Guard.