They have not been particularly bad sea days, for those who usually get to hit the Strait of Gibraltar.
Perhaps that is why the findings have been more curious.
Up to two boats packed with hashish have appeared half-sunken off the coast of Cádiz and Ceuta in recent hours.
In the first, up to 29 packages -about 900 kilos- appeared inside and in the second, 17 wrappers -about 600 kilos-.
In both cases, the Civil Guard investigates the origin of the caches and the reasons that caused the accidents.
It was on the morning of this past Tuesday when a discovery disturbed the people who were walking around the Campo del Sur promenade in Cádiz.
There, near the famous view of the Cadiz Cathedral, the prow of a semi-sunken recreational boat loomed.
A Civil Guard patrol boat with members of the Special Group for Underwater Activities (GEAS) went to the scene to inspect the boat and check if there were any injured people inside or around it.
Once the human damage was ruled out, the agents began to locate some bundles that even appeared over the bow.
The task lasted until early in the afternoon, at which time 29 packages, between 25 and 30 kilos each, were considered recovered.
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The area of the discovery is not the usual one frequented by drug traffickers for their caches.
Neither does the city of Cádiz, where landings of so many kilos of hashish have seldom occurred.
At the moment, the Civil Guard does not know the reason for the presence of the boat in the area, as well as the reason that caused its sinking or what led the traffickers to abandon it.
However, sources from the Armed Institute in Cádiz explain that they have already opened an investigation to try to find out the causes.
One of the probable hypotheses is that the arcade had a problem that caused it to sink and that the drug traffickers were forced to abandon their cargo on the run.
A civil guard during an intervention this Tuesday for drug trafficking in the port of Ceuta. Antonio Sempere (Europa Press)
The discovery of Cádiz has coincided with an event of similar characteristics on the other side of the Strait, near the coast of Ceuta.
There, the Civil Guard located the afternoon of this past Tuesday a
Phantom
-type boat with a length of six meters and a license plate from Morocco when it was capsizing, according to the local media
El Faro de Ceuta.
.
In this case, the agents who went to the scene managed to arrest the two occupants of the boat who, at the time of the incident, were traveling with up to 17 bales of hashish, about 600 kilos.
Both suspects are of Ceuta origin.
The Armed Institute in Ceuta recognizes the difficulty of finding out what caused the sinking, although they work with the hypothesis that it was the occupants of the boat themselves who opened "the water inlet to cause it when they were caught."
It is relatively common for hashish vessels to suffer accidents or sink in the area of the Strait, especially on days of poor visibility or stormy weather.
So much so that the colloquial language has even assigned a name for those who, after an event of these characteristics, rush to the beaches to look for the drug that returns the tide: the
busquimanos
.
On November 29, 2014, two drug boats packed with 2.4 tons of hashish sank in the middle of a storm off the coast of Sancti Petri, in Chiclana de la Frontera.
The bad sea caused the bales to break and disintegrate into hundreds of hashish tablets that were scattered along the coast of Cádiz, which goes from Cádiz capital to Vejer.
The Civil Guard mounted an operation along all those kilometers of beaches and ended up arresting 70 people who tried to take drugs from the beaches.
The police fight against drug trafficking, increased since mid-2018, has meant that traffickers no longer resort to large and powerful
narcolanchas
, a genre now prohibited by the Government.
It has also caused the mafias to resort to drug dumping, as a specialized form of stash.
In September 2019, the Civil Guard arrested around thirty people —among them, a member of Salvamento Marítimo—, accused of anchoring bales of hashish in certain areas of the coast of Tarifa.
Later, specialized divers went to those marked points to collect the drug.
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