Every nice day with decent or better conditions, Capt. Theophile Bourgeois flies a seaplane from his palatial lodge on the Barataria Waterway in Lafitte to the barrier islands that rim Louisiana’s coast. His goal is to find speckled trout as long as a man’s leg that can’t resist topwater plugs.
But Bourgeois admits he’s dreamed about walking one of the beaches and stumbling upon something valuable, like old Spanish bullion, that has washed up on the beach.
On Friday, he nearly tripped over somebody’s treasure.
Bourgeois and his clients were walking the backside of an island in the Chandeleur chain when they saw something rectangular and wrapped in plastic near the water’s edge.
“It was half in the sand, right up on the beach,” Bourgeois said. “My clients were like, ‘What do you think it is?’ I said, ‘I’d bet my left (arm) what that is.’ It was dark; I knew it wasn’t cocaine. I said, ‘That’s weed.'”
The anglers cut it open to check, and Bourgeois’ suspicions were confirmed.
“It was solid seeds and stems,” he said. “It stunk. It was skunk weed.”
Bourgeois said the marijuana was extremely compressed, and he guessed the package weighed around 20 pounds.
From the island, Bourgeois called the authorities, and gave the exact coordinates of the brick of marijuana. They asked if there was any indication on the package about to whom it may belong.
“There was no labeling on it like, ‘Uncle Joe’s pot,’ or anything like that,” Bourgeois said.
After a day’s fishing, Bourgeois returned to his lodge, and posted pictures of his find on Facebook. Some of his out-of-town friends said blocks of drugs found by anglers in Florida are called ‘square grouper.’
Bourgeois declined to name the exact island he was on when he made the find for fear of turning it into a mini Colorado.
“You’d have jet skis, inner tubes, hang-gliders, everything out there looking for the bag of weed,” he said.