There’s more than turtles, whales and sharks lingering off the shores of Costa Rica these days.

While Costa Rica has been steadily chipping away at the never-ending flow of drugs from South America passing near and through its borders, Colombia has meanwhile been boosting coca production.

An over 1-ton capture of cocaine packets floating out at sea off the southern Pacific coastal town of Punta Burica, pales in comparison with Colombia’s historic high of an estimated 1,200 annual tons of cocaine production from its leap to nearly 150,000 hectares of coca cultivation last year, according to figures from the drug policy and information site Insightcrime.org.

The Costa Rican Ministry of Public Security reported this weekend they have now intercepted 9.4 tons of cocaine so far this year. This includes the over 1 ton snag made Saturday around 3 p.m., 100 nautical miles from Punta Burica near the Osa Peninsula.

Several Coast Guard vessels detected the floating load of cocaine packets when patrolling the south Pacific waters. The packets were lumped together and attached to a buoy, evidently there for a vessel to come and collect them to continue their voyage along an illicit drug route.

The Drug Control Police (PCD) received the packets to handle the procedures from there. After testing and weighing the contents of the 1,018 rectangular packages and 57 circular ones, police determined each packet contained approximately one kilo of cocaine, for a total of 1,075 kilograms of the processed, ready-to-market drug.