I'm glad this is only a hypothetical question since the range of answers really runs the gamut of possible solutions. A friend of mine that is a warden here locally, pretty much asked the same question of his mentor when he first went on the job about 30 years ago, the answer at the time was, who said you had to see anything? The answer today would probably be something along the lines of It takes a pretty sorry person not to be able to feed your family with all of the programs available. Pride is pretty much nonexistant in most of those situations today, in short the situation probably won't even come up any more.
For those of the "The law is the law" frame of mind, may I suggest another scenario? I board your boat to do a routine boarding, I expect to find nothing criminal or out of place, just a routine boarding. I need no Probable Cause, I'm the Coast Guard, you are in U.S. waters and I own you. During the course of the boarding, I find residue of a suspicious nature in a seam on the deck, a seed of some unknown plant. One seed. By law, I can confiscate your boat on the spot, take you and all passengers into custody on suspicion of drug smuggling and turn you over to the DEA upon arriving in port. You insist you have no idea of where this seed came from, your boat is moored at a public marina and anybody could have walked onto it at almost anytime over the past two weeks since you last used it. Do I haul you in or take your word for it knowing it will be months and thousands of dollars in legal fees before you can even begin to prove your innocence? If I confiscate your boat, it will likely be subjected to a customs search in which the last stage is to take a chain saw and bisect the boat from stem to stern to enable a more thorough search of every square inch of the vessell. What would you do?