Downeast Goldmine

In the early 1980s, a small fishing town off the coast of Maine was swept into an international drug smuggling ring. Downeast Goldmine paints a portrait of a blue-collar community stumbling into a drug-fueled windfall: hashish dumped overboard years earlier by smugglers during a DEA raid was washing up in scallop nets. Some smoked it. Some sold it. Others threw it back, afraid of getting caught. But for a brief period in the early 1980s, fishermen were hauling in high-value hash—and using the extra cash to buy trucks, homes, and a shot at a stable, middle-class life. When Audrey Ryan learned that her father, a scallop fisherman, had unknowingly hauled hashish from the ocean floor, it launched a years-long investigation into a buried chronicle that shaped her community, their economy, and her family’s identity.

In Downeast Goldmine, Ryan follows the sea hash back to its origin to uncover the story of the Coronado Company, an elite smuggling operation run by ex-hippies and Ivy League businessmen who brought hashish into the U.S. via secluded coves in Maine. Through interviews with smugglers, federal agents, fishermen, and family members, this riveting investigatory narrative reveals how global drug trafficking collided with a local industry that was already beginning a slow-motion collapse. As they always had, Mainers “took what the sea gave them,” and amid this downturn, the lines between outlaws and working men blurred.

Tracing the rise and fall of the sea hash era, which locals called a “Downeast gold rush,” from the failed smuggling operation of the Tusker in 1978 to the economic aftershocks along the Maine coast, Ryan also comes to grip with her own story as she reckons with shame, class, identity and the quiet pull of home. The result is a meditation on the thin line between subsistence and criminality, the myth of the American outlaw, and the cost of upward mobility in a place where the ocean has always provided.