By Dan Scanlan

About a ton of cocaine seized by the U.S. Coast Guard in the Pacific Ocean made it to shore Friday, but not where its smuggler owners wanted.

Instead, hundreds of seized burlap-wrapped packages with an estimated street value of $78 million ended up on a Mayport Naval Station [Jacksonville, Florida] dock.

Watched over by Drug Enforcement Administration agents and Navy police, mask- and glove-clad crew members from the Coast Guard cutter Forward unloaded 80 big bags of packaged cocaine. A Coast Guard law enforcement team on the Navy’s USS Rentz originally seized it Aug. 16 from a Costa Rican fishing boat 260 miles north of the Galapagos Islands during Operation Martillo.

“It’s a joint effort with 14 different nations to keep the illicit traffic out of the Central American traffic routes,” said Petty Officer Lauren Jorgensen, a Coast Guard spokeswoman. “… Once it hits the dock, then DEA will take possession.”

Operation Martillo (Spanish for hammer) is part of an international program targeting illegal drug trafficking off Central America through the Joint Interagency Task Force South. A Navy P-3 Orion patrol plane initially detected the fishing boat. Its two-man crew was turned over to Costa Rican authorities.

As to why 2,123 pounds of cocaine was transported to Mayport instead of a Pacific U.S. port, Forward Capt. Greg Wisener said that is “where the DEA wanted the drugs to go.” The Forward, based in Portsmouth, Va., was involved in its own counter-drug patrol and war games in the Caribbean when the Navy asked for help bringing the drugs to Mayport.

“We traded them off in the Caribbean and brought them back here for the DEA,” Wisener said.

This was the second time in recent years that seized cocaine was brought to Mayport via Operation Martillo.

On July 17, 2012, 7,400 pounds of cocaine was dropped off by the USS Nicholas, a Norfolk, Va.-based guided-missile frigate working with a Coast Guard team intercepting boats in the eastern Pacific. That seizure came from four boats caught in international waters off Colombia and Panama, part of a total 152 tons of cocaine and 21 tons of marijuana seized in 2012 by the task force and valued at more than $3 billion, according to federal officials.

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