Innovative Smuggling Vessel, But Hardly a Submarine

In a Protein Wisdom post titled Das Bloot, which is a backhanded nod toward my favorite submarine movie Das Boot (watch this film in German with subtitles), we are alerted to a Washington Post story titled Plying the Pacific, Subs Surface as Key Tool of Drug Cartels.

The WaPo story informs us that cocaine producers are utilizing “submarines” to smuggle their product out of Columbia to willing purchasers.

In fact, the vessels are only cheaply constructed semi-submersible vehicles, which are incapable of submerging and surfacing, since they lack both ballast tanks to flood to dive beneath the surface, unless they simply want to sink the vessel, permanently, and high pressure air tanks to blow the ballast tanks dry in order to surface.  The vessels remind me more of a poor man’s Merrimac (which was actually the CSS Virginia), because they are definitely not submarines.

UPDATE: Here’s a video shot by the Coast Guard of a semi-submersible.

Posted by on 06/06 at 01:33 PM

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