Powerboat Racing Has Gone To Pot

In the gloom of the midwatch off the Bahamas Bank, a Coast Guard officer studies a flat blip on his radarscope. The "contact," now 10 miles dead ahead, has remained stationary for nearly half an hour. The 95-foot cutter throbs and hums as her four aging Cummins diesels crank out a flank speed of 18 knots. Then the blip suddenly splits in half, like a blue-green amoeba under a microscope. A smaller blip leaps away from the larger one, heading westward toward Florida. The Coast Guard officer checks the smaller blip's speed: 55 knots. He shakes his head in frustration and plows on to intercept the larger, slower blip. Perhaps at least he can catch this one.

An hour later, a sleek blacked-out racing boat burbles into one of the many canals that lace the southeast coast of Florida. Lines hiss toward a backyard dock, and in moments a bucket brigade of dim figures is transferring 50-pound bales wrapped in burlap and plastic garbage bags into a waiting rent-a-truck. Sheafs of greenbacks exchange hands, thick wads of them, signaling the end of another successful dope run.

A new and ugly era has begun in the sport of offshore powerboat racing. Where once swift, deep-V-hulled ocean racers competed solely in kidney-jarring dashes over the high seas for purses of perhaps $5,000 and a trophy, more and more boats are now running for million-dollar payoffs. Their competition is not other ocean racers but the Coast Guard, the U.S. Customs Service and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration—because the cargo is marijuana.

Consider the economics. In Colombia—now the major purveyor of grass to the U.S.—marijuana grown in the rugged Guajira Peninsula, east of the Caribbean port of Barranquilla, sells for $4 to $6 a pound. Operators of mother ships, usually 60-to-90-foot "island freighters," buy it on the beach at $40 a pound. The mother ships run up to Florida, usually avoiding Coast Guard "choke points" in the Mona Pass or Windward Passage areas of the Caribbean by swinging far east, and rendezvous with smaller vessels off the Keys or in the Bahamas. These carriers—some of them fast ocean racers with a laden draft of only two feet at top speed—pay the mother ship about $125 a pound for the stuff. On the beach in the Keys or Miami or Fort Lauderdale, they turn it around for $350 a pound. On the street in New York, the grass sells for $40 to $50 an ounce, or as much as $800 a pound.

"There is big money to be made at every step along the way," says Don Aronow, the man whose competitive skill and Donzi and Cigarette hulls did so much to popularize modern ocean powerboat racing. "We in the ocean-racing fraternity are flattered that the dope runners prefer our kind of boat, but when they get caught we don't like it. We have torn emotions. A kid who works for me was offered $100,000 to run out to sea one night and resupply fuel for a dope boat. He refused, but it must have been a terrible temptation. Heck, lately we've been getting letters from jailbirds asking for complete specs and prices on our Cigarettes."

One of the nice ironies of the dope trade is that Aronow named his Cigarette design for the most popular rum-running boat of the Prohibition era. Just as in the days of the booze boats, big money is accompanied by bloody violence, as one gang of smugglers tries to rip off another. Over the past year, there have been 27 unsolved drug murders in Florida, most of the victims being young people engaged in deals that fell through in a blaze of gunfire and ended in a ditch, canal or mangrove swamp.

"When the Colombian traffic got heavy a couple of years ago," says Jim Dingfelder, a spokesman for Customs in Miami, "there were quite a few runners using high-performance boats—Corsas, Donzis, Magnums, Signatures, Performers and the like. Then they shifted to slower but less conspicuous vessels: shrimpers, trawlers, sardine boats, sport fishermen and luxury yachts. But lately the swing has been back to ocean racers." Of the 140 boats now in seizure by the Customs in Miami, about 20 are offshore racing powerboats. Some are new and shiny, as if the impound area were a showroom. But no one knows for sure what percentage of the boats get through and what percentage get caught in their high-speed runs.

Actually, the loss of one drug boat—or even half a dozen—is of little economic concern to a big operator. "These guys have money to burn," says W. B. MacBride, chief of marine operations for Miami Customs. "They have enough cash to walk out on the dock and buy three 53-foot Hatterases at $375,000 each." Thus the price tag for an ocean racer is peanuts, even for a 40-foot Cigarette or Corsa fitted out with engines and drives. "I would estimate that for $65,000—or maybe less—you could put together a top drug-running racing boat," says Aronow, "a 35-to-40-footer fully equipped with twin 454-cubic-inch MerCruiser engines, outsized 350-to-400-gallon fuel tanks, sophisticated navigation and radio gear, the works."

The drug runners frequently show up at one or another of the ocean-racer factories on Miami's N.E. 188th Street ("Fleet Street," the racers call the area) with a wad of bills and a gleam in their eyes. After kicking a few hulls, they say, "Wrap it up and I'll take it from here." They usually choose a stripped, basic hull and deck, power plant and linkages. That package comes to about $40,000. Another $3,000 buys the large fuel tanks, which allow for a cruising range of 400 miles, three times the distance to and from any Bahamian rendezvous. According to MacBride of Customs, they then hang top-of-the-line electronics on the boat: "Omega satellite navigators at $10,000 a copy, Tracker II radars at $10,000 on up to $20,000, the latest and best single-sideband radios, computerized Loran C systems that can fix rendezvous coordinates within 50 feet, Bearcat Models 210 and 250 radar-detecting 'fuzz busters'—you name it, they've got it as part of their equipment."

The only part of the boat that isn't hung with expensive goodies is the long cabin forward of the cockpit. This is the business end of the boat. No bunks, no heads, no galley. All ports are blacked out and taped tight. A 40-foot racing hull can easily carry 3,000 pounds of marijuana, in bundles compressed by a garbage compactor and made waterproof by plastic bagging. One 40-foot Corsa seized by Customs carried 7,000 pounds, according to Dingfelder, and yet was tracked by a government helicopter at speeds of 60 or 70 mph.