I can say I 'ran whisky to the Indians'.
I was sailing my 24'7" sailboat south from Kodiak and we were in British Colombia and (as usual) scratching out asses financially.
While we still had some money, we knew that it really wasn't going to last very long and from firsthand experience that poverty sucks.
Time to crank up the lifestyle.
I don't remember the who/what/when of the idea but I think it came up when one of the locals along the line mentioned that one of the Indian villages was dry.
That's when the idea popped into my head.
I was smart enough to know that if we showed up and started selling whisky in one of these villages we'd be thrown in jail and they would throw away the key. I also knew that I would probably have a brief window before word got out that two white guys were selling hooch out of a sailboat. Probably less than 30 minutes.
We pooled out meager funds and bought 2 cases of cheap whisky from a village liquor store, set sail and found a place to hole up for a day or two.
The salmon boats were having a pretty good season that year and were due back into their various villages inside a day or two.
With the arrival of the salmon fleet into the village the two of us ghosted in and came up alongside a drum seiner. The first thing one of the crew asked me is if I had a beer. I didn't. I told him I had a bottle of whisky and he promptly offered me $100 for it. Done deal.
Inside of a minute I had sold 6 bottles to the rest of the crew and raked in $600. The first $100 offer had set the price. Two minutes later the crew of the seiner next to them swarmed aboard and bought another $600 worth and then the skipper of the third boat offered to pay $1000 for the second case. Done deal.
Instantly I threw the money in a drawer, hopped out on deck and fired up the engine. My mate threw off the lines and we disappeared with $2200 our coffers. Less the outlay we were about $2000 ahead of the game.
We moved at flank speed south and didn't even slow down until after dark and anchored up in a small cove somewhere.
The next morning we looked at our situation. We were about 75 miles from the 'scene of the crime' and were just two guys in a nondescript small sailboat cruising along. We'd been in and out of the village in under 20 minutes and had not checked in with anyone. The quantities we had sold were fairly small and the likelihood of the RCMP making a major case out of our misdeeds was small. While a handful of fishermen probably got pretty plastered, it wasn't like the entire village was trashed and on the warpath.
A couple of days later we found out just how lucky we were from a troller we met that told us a wild story about two white men that got the whole village plastered and sailed off.
Apparently according to Rumor Control had it that two white men brought cases and cases of whisky into the village and the whole place went completely crazy. I attributed that one to the growing of a story with each retelling.
However, I do think, looking back on it is that we got away with it only because we were in and out of the village so quickly and the quantity we sold was relatively small.
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I just did a Google search regarding the dry Indian villages in British Colombia and discovered that the dry villages are no longer dry. I think this took place in the late 90s because the remaining few of them started getting ferry service and people would just bring liquor home with them when they visited people in wet areas. Better to keep the money in town.
It's probably easier to enforce laws like that in remote places because travel to the outside is a lot lower.
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