The Trinidad and To­ba­go Coast Guard is pur­su­ing a re­port of miss­ing fish­er­men and a ves­sel de­spite what it said was the vague and sketchy in­for­ma­tion giv­en to them.

A me­dia tour with Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young on board the pa­trol ves­sel TTS Quinam yes­ter­day was in­ter­rupt­ed by a group of fish­er­men who ap­proached the boat and claimed their friends had gone miss­ing.

The three men al­leged that their friends were on­board a pirogue when it ran out of gas and be­gan to drift on Tues­day. The men said they re­ceived re­ports that the ves­sel was seen be­ing towed by an At­lantic LNG ves­sel.

Short­ly af­ter lodg­ing the re­port to the Coast Guard, a check was made on the pirogue af­ter which the three fish­er­men then pro­ceed­ed to­wards the Venezue­lan coast­line.

Act­ing com­man­der of the TTCG Com­man­der Don Po­lo said while an in­ves­ti­ga­tion would be launched in­to the miss­ing per­son re­port, he iden­ti­fied some anom­alies with the state­ments giv­en.

“We are not one hun­dred per cent sure they are ac­tu­al­ly miss­ing, ap­par­ent­ly no in­for­ma­tion was for­ward­ed to the coast guard pri­or to now to let us know a ves­sel was in dis­tress, de­spite that we would open a search and res­cue file and mount a search and res­cue op­er­a­tions us­ing the avail­able re­sources to the en­tire Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

Com­man­der Po­lo, how­ev­er, stressed that the ab­sence of in­for­ma­tion is of­ten a se­ri­ous prob­lem Coast Guards­men face when called in­to ac­tion.

“It is made just a bit more dif­fi­cult by us not re­ceiv­ing clear in­for­ma­tion, that is what we are fight­ing against, it is what is mak­ing our job a lot more dif­fi­cult, I don’t know why they would not have called the coast guard since yes­ter­day (Tues­day) but we will con­tin­ue to treat this as a le­git­i­mate search and res­cue.”

Mean­while, with the term “porous bor­ders” com­mon to the na­tion­al dis­course, Act­ing Com­man­der Po­lo said it is some­thing that con­tin­ues to be tak­en se­ri­ous­ly and one that con­tin­ues to be a trou­ble­some is­sue. He said though, the Coast Guard has made some in­roads.

“Thus far for the cal­en­dar year 2019, the TTCG has seized just un­der 900 kilo­grams of nar­cotics con­sist­ing of about 675 kilo­grams of mar­i­jua­na and 221 ki­los of co­caine for a com­bined street val­ue of 110 mil­lion dol­lars.”

He added that fol­low­ing the end of the Venezue­lan reg­is­tra­tion pe­ri­od sev­er­al ves­sels were in­ter­cept­ed with Venezue­lans seek­ing il­le­gal en­try.

“We have as­sist­ed the Im­mi­gra­tion Di­vi­sion in man­ag­ing and de­tain­ing over 400 ir­reg­u­lar mi­grants and as­sist­ed the Min­istry of Health by re­mov­ing in ex­cess of 40 an­i­mals from ves­sels be­ing il­le­gal­ly smug­gled in­to the coun­try.”