Well I’ll be goddamned- there’re still REAL pirates out there.
I mean who’d a thunk it? In this day and age when technology trumps everything and GPS can track little kids walking home from school or triangulate car accidents and send rescue almost as soon as your air bags burst that something as anachronistic-seeming as real pirates still exist kinda bends the mind.
I mean, really?
And yet, out there in the cold salty spray of the Indian Ocean Somali pirates armed with automatic weapons are loping about in small open boats and preying on ships and shipping seemingly willingly at will.
The World denounces them and their piratical ways. Like they care. The pirates, I mean. At last count they held more than 660 hostages and around 30 vessels that they use to pirate more vessels if the owners can’t or won’t pony up the big bucks to release them, running them until they’re used up pieces of floating garbage.
A part of me, hopefully the biggest and best part of me, joins in the denunciation and wonders why we (we being the rest of the world) can’t just rock and roll into Somali and kill everything looking remotely pirate-like.
But. And yet.
A little squeaky part of me, and probably the part that still hopes I’m not the big pussy I am, secretly cheers for the loping pirates. I mean, can you imagine attacking a bazillion ton container ship from a 26 foot panga?
Does desperation breed courage or is it vice versa?
oceandoggy.com 
I hear you. It’s hard to believe they exist, AND YET THEY DO. So, armed (so to speak) with that info, why would you take your family sailing in that area?? Why? Super Stupid Syndrome?
And what’s really sucky is most sailor boat types don’t even carry a gun. Maybe they just dream about the free and wild and forget that it’s REALLY free and wild.
Have to agree with Bunky….why, why, why would anyone without massive gun power on board their ship sail their family into those waters? Searching for Captain Jack Sparrow?
Interesting you mention attacking a container ship from a panga…it was said that the Vietnamese in the jungles use to try to bring down US helicopters with bows and arrows during the Vietnam war. Courageous or crazy, you have to marvel at the determination of an enemy that “believes” they can do it with what little they have.
And a part of me does.
It ain’t PC to side with pirates but hey, ya gotta admit, we’re seeing firsthand and up close some of the old Blackbeard lore.
Their ruthlessness strikes a chord?