Tag Archives: off the Maine coast
Smugglers dumped millions in drugs off Maine’s coast. Struggling fishermen saw a jackpot.
One cold night in April 1983, narcotics officers arrived at the Northeast Harbor Marina on Mount Desert Island. The drug-sniffing dog with them strained at the end of a leash. They’d received an anonymous tip that some of the scallop boats in the area had been carrying illegal drugs along with their catches. They waited in the shadows, preparing to pounce on the evidence that would confirm the rumors. Out on the dark waters, a 42-foot scallop dragger named F/V Joshua’s Delight glided toward the harbor. One of the fishermen aboard that night was my father, Frank Ryan, then 34. That night, my father hoped his luck was changing. But he wasn’t thinking about scallops. While dredging the ocean floor that afternoon, their nets had caught something else. When they hauled them up, among thousands of scallops were chunks of a sticky, leathery substance shaped like the sole of a shoe. Dense and potent, you could smell it the instant it came on deck: hashish. >click to read< 11:11
A dramatic rescue off the Maine coast changes the course of many lives
Russie Lane describes himself as a “reluctant storyteller.” All his life he has stuttered, and about fifteen years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He prefers to be in the background. The story he set out to research had always been part of the Lane family history. Something they all knew about and remembered – but rarely spoke about. They referred to it simply as “the rescue.” All he had was one single newspaper article confirming what had happened that summer day off the coast of Maine. video, >click to read< 09:04
