Thread: Large quantity of marijuana was found with panga boat, officials say

By Kathe Tanner
December 26, 2013
sanluisobispo.com

Sheriff’s officials apparently recovered all or most of the cargo carried by a drug-smuggling panga boat that was found Monday on the beach at Arroyo de la Cruz, north of Piedras Blancas Lighthouse and San Simeon.

At least 10 panga boats have been recovered from San Luis Obispo County shores since May 2012, when a panga with 1,800 pounds of marijuana was found beached just north of Piedras Blancas. Most of the boats have landed along the North Coast, from San Simeon to an area south of Ragged Point.

Officials haven’t released details about how much marijuana was recovered from the latest boat, or its value. But the quantity was enough to fill the Sheriff’s Office utility trailer, some officials who were at the scene said.

An anonymous call reporting the panga’s location came in late Monday afternoon. A large contingent of deputies and investigators, State Park rangers and CHP officers responded to the scene as dusk fell.

“There was a load of marijuana, many bales,” Sheriff’s Sgt. Stuart MacDonald said Thursday. “If it was not the whole load, it was a substantial part of it. It looked to me to be about all the vessel would carry.”

Hoping to catch the alleged smugglers, the law enforcers set up a perimeter before going in to the boat’s location. But the boat’s crew apparently had disappeared into the remote area that includes rolling ranchland, State Park property and the light station.

While investigators haven’t determined why the panga landed in the daylight when the normal mode is to slide into the shore at night, some possible reasons are being considered.

“I don’t know what their reason was for coming onshore at that time,” MacDonald said. “Obviously, it was still light at the time the call came in … it did wind up getting foggy, so maybe they were trying to get to shore before the fog did. Or maybe they were having fuel issues” or engine problems.

The bales had been offloaded onto the beach. The smugglers then fled the scene, perhaps because they realized they’d been spotted.

“I think it’s safe to say, the shoreside logistics were not in place,” MacDonald said. “There appears to have been no vehicle to load the drugs into.”

On Tuesday, members of the Sheriff’s Dive Team, North Coast Ocean Rescue Team and U.S. Coast Guard convened to relaunch the panga at high tide. Team member Richard Stacy said the panga may have been worth about $10,000, and he estimated each of the two 225-HP Yamaha motors had a value of about $20,000.

A dive team member drove the panga to Morro Bay, escorted by the Coast Guard, officials said.

Pangas are used as open-top fishing boats in Central America. Over the past few years, high-speed pangas increasingly have been used to transport people and drugs from Mexico to the United States. But as law enforcement in Southern California became more successful at intercepting the boats, the smugglers started heading farther out to sea — and pushing farther north.

The boats have been stopped and confiscated from San Diego to San Luis Obispo counties, though the number discovered locally has been far fewer than in other areas of the state. The scenic but remote North Coast shoreline provides landing sites that can't be seen from the highway, such as the Arroyo de la Cruz beach.

Many of those spots allegedly were used by smugglers in other areas, especially during such periods as Prohibition and the mission-building years of the 1800s.

Searching for pangas is painstaking, time-consuming work. Sheriff Ian Parkinson requested federal assistance about a year ago, and the department received a federal grant that it has used to increase coastal patrols in search of panga boats.

However, that funding doesn’t begin to cover the expenses of patrolling the county’s long coastline, much of it in remote areas that are difficult to access, Parkinson said last month. So he’s pushing for more money to help stem the tide.

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2013/12...juana-was.html

Legalization, regulation, taxation, and education. Anything else is a delusion.

Combine the above with Universal E-Verify, and the poorest Americans will have jobs and be role models for their young. "Drug reform" would also be a lot less expensive that our current policy, which is a total failure.

Demand creates supply. It was ever so.
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