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Tampa Mayor Jane Castor (D) was on a fishing trip with her family last month when her younger brother saw something in the water. As the family boat got closer to the piece of debris, Castor, who previously served as Tampa’s police chief, realized the object was something fishy.

“I thought it was shade, as opposed to something shady,” she jokingly told reporters this week. “But the closer we got, I was like whew, that would be a bale of cocaine.”

Castor’s family retrieved the bundles of cocaine, which weighed 70 pounds and were wrapped in layers of plastic that had pictures of purple butterflies on them. The plastic was split open, Castor said, suggesting to her that they had been in the water for a while. Once ashore, the family turned over the drugs to two federal agents, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

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The U.S. Border Patrol announced the discovery in a July 24 tweet, crediting an unnamed “recreational boater” in the Florida Keys for finding the estimated $1.1 million worth of cocaine. Castor retweeted the message Wednesday, adding a laughing emoji.

Cocaine found in White House near where guests enter West Wing

Castor, a 31-year veteran of the Tampa Police Department with experience in narcotics investigations, told reporters she had never before found floating bales of cocaine in the water. The rest of the trip was uneventful, with the Castors hauling five dozen lobsters, but no more sacks of drugs.

Castor, 62 and a Tampa native, is the city’s first female police chief and its first openly gay mayor. She was elected in 2019 and reelected this year. She lives with her longtime partner, Ana Cruz, and their two sons, Sergei and Seely, according to her biography.

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She was a Republican for more than three decades until 2015, when she switched her voter registration to the Democratic Party. She described her move as one of principle, according to the Tampa Bay Times, saying the Republican Party had “gotten further and further away” from being a group that treated everyone fairly and embraced diversity.

Cruz, Castor’s partner, is a former executive director of the Florida Democratic Party and served on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 and 2016 campaigns.

Castor’s office and the Border Patrol could not be immediately reached for comment late Wednesday.

correction

A previous version of this article incorrectly said Jane Castor was the first female mayor of Tampa. She was Tampa's first female police chief, not its first female mayor. The article has been corrected.

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