A high old time on Thanksgiving 1977 - 25 tons of marijuana on beach November 22, 2007 - fbnewsleader.com
This week marks the 30th anniversary of the most notorious beach party Fernandina Beach has known in recent memory.
It was a foggy Thanksgiving morning in 1977 when Gilberto, a boat loaded with 25 tons of Colombian marijuana, went aground on the jetties at the north end of the island.
Local resident Norman Knight was one of the firefighters sent to put out a fire that had started on the grounded boat. "We had a report of a boat drifting up on the north end of the beach," he remembers. Some of the bales of marijuana were already being unloaded by pickup truck. The fire was too advanced to subdue.
About 30 to 45 minutes after the firefighters moved away, he says, the boat suddenly exploded, sending tons of Colombian gold into the air, onto the beach and into the water.
"We all got high from the smoke," he says. "We were hungry as hell, I can tell you."
News reports from the time say the boat was likely set on fire by the crew, who were later arrested for smuggling.
Knight remembers that Nassau County prisoners were sent to
rake up the pot, while other residents helped by hauling bales to the police station in their pickups.
Some resourceful residents, however, had an even better idea. Police began arresting people on the beach who were picking up the pot for their own consumption.
An article in the Nov. 30, 1977, News-Leader reported, "(Police Chief H.W. Doak) pointed out that an excess of five grams of weed constitutes a felony. .... Many of those arrested during the past few days are still lodged in the Nassau County Jail, hoping that someone will put up enough money for the bonds."
Kevin McCarthy, owner of Amelia River Cruises & Charters, remembers that foggy Thanksgiving morning. "(The Gilberto) missed the inlet by a few hundred yards," he said. "Everyone who was here then remembers it."
Reports said the marijuana was likely contaminated with diesel fuel and saturated with salt water, but that didn't stop pot enthusiasts. "People from all over the country showed up," McCarthy said, looking for marijuana on the beaches. "The marijuana looked like seaweed," he remembers. "Cumberland Island was also covered with it. The county sheriff and police protected the shoreline at Fort Clinch for days and days."
The police couldn't staff the beaches 24 hours a day, however. McCarthy said "after chasing people up and down the sand dunes for days, the police just left it there."
According to the News-Leader, the incident was reported on national television by Walter Cronkite of CBS News.
A few weeks later, local resident Paul Rider got the idea to make and sell T-shirts commemorating the windfall. The shirts were silk-screened in Daytona Beach, according to a News-Leader article from January 1978.
Among those buying the shirts were "city police officers, attorneys, firemen, newsmen, sheriff deputies and those who had benefited from the wreck."
The T-shirts said, "Thanksgiving 1977 - Fernandina Beach, Florida - 25 Tons," and sported a large marijuana leaf.
The three crew members of the Gilberto - Capt. Lorenzo Aros, Marino Iglasias and Pedro Pacheco, awaiting trial at Nassau County Jail - also wanted some T-shirts. Rider obliged them by sending shirts free of charge.
Frank Chadwick, an agent for U.S. Customs in Jacksonville, said it was "one of the biggest hauls of marijuana ever brought into the country on a vessel that size," according to the 1977 News-Leader article.
The value of the marijuana was estimated at the time to be about $18 million.
Nick Deonas, owner of the real estate company, was a firefighter at the time, but not at the scene when it happened. "For a long time afterwards, up and down the beach, there was marijuana," he says. "That was quite a Thanksgiving, definitely out of the norm, I can tell you that."
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