Florida boaters find $1m worth of cocaine in Atlantic Ocean | Florida

Boaters found $1 million worth of cocaine off the coast of Florida Keys, authorities said.

In a Facebook post on Sunday, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department announced that recreational boats found a package containing approximately 21 kg (61 lb) of packaged cocaine about seven miles (11 km) off Islamorada, an island community in the Florida Keys.

Pictures and video clips posted online showed the cocaine packages wrapped in clear plastic and depicting flying bald eagles.

Samuel Briggs II, acting chief of the US Border Patrol’s Miami sector, said the cocaine would be seized by Border Patrol agents. “We appreciate the support of the Good Samaritan [sic] in our community,” Briggs II wrote.

Earlier this month, divers in Key West, Florida, discovered more than a dozen packages of suspected cocaine in the Atlantic Ocean. The packages, which were marked with a blue “Nike SB” label and the Nike swoosh logo, were found approximately 100 feet underwater.

This month, authorities also seized and unloaded nearly 2,180 kilograms of cocaine, worth more than $63 million, at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The drugs were found during two interdictions 24 miles north of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Florida Keys beachgoers in May discovered a suspicious package on the beach that turned out to contain approximately 30 kg of cocaine, worth approximately $1 million.

In January, the US Coast Guard seized more than one ton of cocaine, worth $32 million, in international waters of the Caribbean Sea during two separate incidents. Six suspected smugglers were arrested after the seizures, the US Coast Guard said said.

Because of Florida’s proximity to South America and its condition like an area of ​​high intensity drug traffickingso much cocaine has been found in waters near the state that experts say that “cocaine sharks” can consume the drugs underwater.