For most people, pirates are fiction, nothing more than the stuff of Hollywood cinema. But their very real impact on those traveling international waters became vividly clear in April, when Somali pirates seized the cargo vessel MV Maersk Alabama and held her captain in a lifeboat for three days.
The violent drama, which ended when U.S. forces killed three pirates and rescued the hostage, was covered live and captured attention worldwide. It was enough to frighten any sailor.
But i1f you're planning a blue-water passage to exotic ports around the globe and find yourself worrying about recent events, experts who track these incidents say you don't need to postpone your travels.
While you need to take special precautions when boating in the area around Somalia and the Gulf of Aden where most of the attacks are known to occur, the world's oceans aren't significantly more dangerous for yachts and recreational boats than they were a few years ago.
"The threat to small yachts certainly exists, but the pirates' focus is on larger commercial ships," such as tankers and bulk carriers, says Phillip Cable, director of Maritime Asset Security and Training Ltd. (MAST), a British firm that specializes in maritime security. There are more commercial vessels to choose from, they carry more lucrative cargoes and their owners have been willing to pay handsome ransoms often running into several million dollars. The saga of the Maersk Alabama was emblematic of such incidents.
US MARINE CORPSThe guided-missile destroyer USS Bainbridge tows the lifeboat from the Maersk Alabama to the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer, in background, to be processed for evidence after the successful rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips. Phillips was held captive by suspected Somali pirates in the lifeboat in the Indian Ocean for five days after a failed hijacking attempt off the Somali coast.PIRATES STILL PREY
That doesn't mean that you can stop worrying about piracy altogether. Pirates still prey on sailboats and megayachts, and some boaters are robbed or beaten, and a few are killed each year. Noonsite Ltd., a London-based group that monitors piracy against recreational vessels, reports there already have a small number of incidents this year, mostly involving armed robbery, with occasional shootings. They note that the figures they collect don't represent a reliable tally of events because boaters generally do not report contact with pirates.
Noonsite's records include, among others, the hijacking of a 43-foot French cruising yacht, the Tanit, off the coast of Somalia in April; the robbery and murder of an Australian sailor in Antigua; the robbery of a British couple in Thailand (and the murder of the boat's skipper); and an attack against a British motor yacht off Venezuela.
The International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a London-based organization that monitors piracy in ocean waters, reports that the number of attacks against vessels of all sorts soared to 205 in the first five months of this year, essentially double the 103 attacks that it recorded during the same January-through-May period in 2008.
Still, only five of that total have involved yachts or other recreational vessels, up from two during the same time frame in 2008. However, Cyrus Mody, the organization's manager, says the figures for yachts are incomplete, and are simply too small to make reliable comparisons. The group maintains a piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
UNREPORTED CRIMES
One reason for the dearth of reliable statistics on piracy against yachts is that by and large recreational boaters usually don't report such attacks, Mody and others in the field assert. Many boaters don't want their names made public after such incidents. And some don't want to go to the trouble of contacting local authorities and risking retribution from pirates or their cohorts ashore.
Martin N. Murphy, a piracy expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense-oriented think tank in Washington, estimates that only about half the attacks against yachts or recreational boats ever get reported. Much of what ultimately is passed along is inaccurate or incomplete, he says.
US NAVYMembers of the USS Gettysburg and U.S. Coast Guard Tactical Law Enforcement Team South Detachment 409 detain suspected pirates after responding to a merchant vessel distress signal in the Gulf of Aden on May 13."The piracy that does get reported is usually the kind that no one can ignore, such as when people have been killed," he says. Murphy discusses piracy involving yachts and recreational vessels in a new book, Small Boats, Weak States, Dirty Money: Piracy and Maritime Terrorism in the Modern World.
HARD TO APPREHEND
One problem is that piracy against yachts and recreational boats is so random that it's difficult for law enforcement to mount efforts to control it. In many cases, the maritime forces maintained by developing countries in whose waters such attacks occur are neither equipped for nor capable of responding to distress calls.
Although navies of the U.S. and other countries have assembled an international coalition of warships to help protect the large commercial ships off Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden, yachts and recreational boats that are circumnavigating the globe in many other areas are essentially on their own.
Most of the new anti-piracy gadgetry, such as special sensing devices, high-pressure hoses and ultra-shrill acoustic guns, is designed for large commercial vessels and is much too bulky – and too costly – for recreational boats. And hiring private security firms to protect a private vessel is usually too expensive for the common boater to afford.
DIFFICULT TO PROSECUTE
Additionally, it's difficult to prosecute a pirate even if authorities did apprehend him. Although piracy is a crime under international law, many developing countries lack the domestic legal authority they think they need to bring a pirate to trial. In some cases, the pirates are in cahoots with local police or maritime authorities.
"We have yet to see a successful prosecution" involving piracy against yachts, Murphy says.
Even so, cruising sailors and megayacht crews have become far more alert to the piracy problem in recent years. They have begun taking small but important steps to guard against such attacks, from sailing in convoys to avoiding pirate-infested waters in the first place. And signs are that it's having an impact.
Organizers of the round-the-world Volvo Ocean Race re-routed the course last year and this year to avoid some of the more dangerous waters, and they hired a pair of maritime security companies to brief all 88 participating crewmen on how to handle attacks – the first time that they have resorted to such precautions.
