Need for speed: Evolution of the busted drug runners' boats

The one that immediately springs to mind are the drug runners who regularly ferry boatloads of illicit vegetable matter and narcotic white powder from Latin America to North America.

A glance at the US Coast Guard website reveals that on-water drug busts are surprisingly common as suspicious-looking vessels are chased down, boarded and searched. In one month alone recently, around 7.3 tonnes of illicit drugs was intercepted.

As the US Coast Guard’s ability to run down the drug smugglers has increased, so too has the smugglers’ ability to try and give them the slip.

Over time the drug cartels have evolved their on-water transport from fast-moving but expensive Miami Vice-style “picuda” cigarette boats – big, long, expensive, exceptionally powerful and able to carry big loads – to so-called “panga” boats – cheap to make, hard to see on radar, long and fast with a large payload – that tended to blend in more with the crowds. The US Coast Guard refers to these types of high-powered craft they intercept as “go-fast” boats.

In more recent times, a new generation of low-profile go-fast versions have emerged that hug the water, making them difficult to spot from water level – the so-called “very slender vessels”, or VSVs.

Rather than perform like a conventional boat, these VSVs are designed to punch through waves, acting like a semi-submarine as the rest of the boat follows the bow through the wave. These boats are deliberately designed to go slower than surface boats, relying more on their low profiles to avoiding detection than their ability to out-run the coast guard.

The downside? They don’t seem to be able to carry as much of the money-making payload as the more conventional craft they’re displacing.

The boats the smugglers use seem to favour wear outboard engines, with anywhere between one and four rigged across the transom. Some look like fairly crude constructions, feeding fuel to multiple rigs via a gravity-fed 44-gallon drum.

The engines they choose to power these craft, too, don’t go overboard on displacement. A common theme we’ve noticed seems to hover around 75 horsepower per unit as the decidedly second-hand outboard engine of choice. At the higher end, we’re noticing what looks like twin and triple 200hp engines.

Australia’s drug-running boats tend to be a little different. The most notorious was the Pong Su, a Korean-flagged freighter that in 2003 attempted to smuggle what was believed to be about 125kg of heroin.

The subsequent chase along Australia’s eastern shoreline, in which the Pong Su was eventually stopped and boarded off the coast of Newcastle as it bolted for international waters, occurred at a much more tempered speed.