Nation: Drugs and Death on the High Seas

A Bahamian triangle of smugglers and unwary skippers

A soft warning to the thoughtful skipper on the possibility of hijacking. The U.S. Coast Guard advises owners of yachts cruising in the Bahamas and Caribbean to be very careful about taking on hitchhikers and paid hands. Even a rescue at sea should be approached with caution.

It is an unusual cautionary note in these days of pleasure cruises in the Bahamas and the Caribbean, where the legends of bloodthirsty pirates like Blackbeard and Jean Lafitte survive only in tourist brochures. But the warning, published in the respected Yachtsman's Guide to the Bahamas, is aimed at putting modern skippers on their guard against today's version of piracy: yachtjacking by drug smugglers who use tiny Bahamian cays as bases for shipping cocaine and marijuana from Latin America to South Florida.

Just how many yachts have fallen prey to smugglers is unknown; unless the boats or debris from them turn up, the U.S. Coast Guard lists missing yachts as "overdue pending further developments." But skippers in marinas along the Florida coast are increasingly convinced that many of them are not simply missing. Three incidents in particular have heightened boatowners' apprehensions:

> In the logbook of their 41-ft. sloop Kalia III, Patti Kamerer, 46, recorded "Anchor up!" on April 28 as she and her husband William, 55, left Fort Myers for a six-month "dream cruise" of the Bahamas. It ended on July 25 with another laconic log entry: "Moored at Pipe Cay." Six days later, Illinois State Representative Harry Yourell, 62, and Son Peter, 20, aboard their 25-ft. cabin cruiser, eased up to the Kalia III and made a grisly discovery: in a dinghy bobbing astern lay a bloated body. The yacht was riddled with shotgun pellets, smeared with blood and littered with debris, including Patti's spectacles and bikini bra. Yourell told TIME Midwest Bureau Chief Benjamin W. Gate: "I haven't seen anything as bad since the South Pacific in World War II." Yourell radioed the authorities, who sent a plane to fly over the cay. But by the time the police arrived by boat a day later, the body had apparently slipped into the sea and disappeared. Nassau authorities inexplicably claimed that there never had been a body until Yourell angrily made public his photographs of the scene. Bahamian authorities now acknowledge that a constable aboard the plane spotted the body and that the yacht was a shambles as described by Yourell (though they insist, despite accounts from at least three eyewitnesses, that there were no shotgun holes or embedded pellets in the yacht).