It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s … the US Coast Guard?

Wednesday morning we awoke to some excitement. I walked out on our deck at 6 a.m. and saw a few of our guys walking around on the docks. This meant something was up. Work doesn’t start until 7, and no one but the cooks wanders around until then.

When I went down, I saw the source. A huge US Coast Guard ship was circling out in the sea beyond our dock. It had stopped a shrimp boat from Jonesville and was sending a smaller boat over. They boarded and were there for a long time. For a few hours, the Coast Guard boat circled the sea, and the shrimp boat stayed in place. They were being searched.

According to our guys, the only time the US Coast Guard shows up around here is if they are tracking drug runners. Some of the shrimpers have been caught in the past running not shrimp but “white grouper,” a local name for the packages of cocaine that sometimes wash ashore here.

We watched for awhile, but we didn’t see anything terribly incriminating from the distance. Eventually, the shrimper went home, and the Coast Guard sailed away. However, the guys worked extra hard that day at clearing the debris that had washed ashore … just in case the shrimper had managed to bail her load of white grouper before she was boarded.