Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Re: the next step in drug traffic cut short. Subs!

["Captain Nemo" <vulcania@interpac.net>]

----- Original Message -----
From: <Gregc02@ibm.net>
To: <personal_submersibles@psubs.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 09, 2000 5:42 AM
Subject: Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Re: the next step in drug traffic cut short.
Subs!


"As usual, the war on drugs types are hyperventilating about how much
cocaine (200 tons) the thing could haul. (SNIP)...even if you filled the
ENTIRE space with cocaine, like it was a silo, and you had it compressed to
the same weight per cubic foot as water (62.5 lbs/cu ft.), it would only
hold about 157 tons."

Ha!  Sounds like those Colombian DEA guys (or maybe the news reporters) have
been snorting some of that stuff they've been seizing!  Next morning, after
the guy woke up, it was probably something like "(Groan) Naw, it was more
like 20 tons at the most."  But by then it was in all the papers, so.....

But again, has anyone actually seen anything in the news that PROVES this
boat was intended to haul drugs?  Was there a "cooker" in the back room; or
so much as a dusty mirror or even a roach clip found on the premises?  I
realize we're talking about the "banana republics", and there's no such
thing as the 4th Amendment down there.  But this brings back memories of the
time I was loading the batteries into the Nautilus (while chatting with a
guy from the church around the corner) and an ol' bat in the neighborhood
sent the police to check me out because she said I was "loading something
suspicious into a submarine".

Anyway, all that stuff aside, the C-Sub is at least one of the most
ambitious backyard boats I've seen, and I've really got to give those guys
high marks for ingenuity.  With that kind of ability, maybe they should go
into the legitimate business of building tourist submarines.  They might not
get quite as rich as fast as they might sneaking nose candy into the US; but
at least they wouldn't be hiding out in the jungle playing tag with the
Colombian Army, either.

And then again, there's always the US anti-submarine detection and defense
forces to think about; which were quite good, the last time I heard.  I
don't think I'd want to be probing our coastal waters in an unidentified 100
foot-long  magnetic anomaly,  when we've got things like Navy P-3 Orions
with airborne MAD units; Marine CH-53 helicopters with cable-deployed
sonobuoys; and homing torpedoes that think for themselves, find targets, and
blow them up.

Still: it was a neat sub project that will probably have many of us thinking
about larger boats like the one Carsten is presently building.

Pat