Pirates are a menace you know! As a young lad, and I’m certainly no spring chicken now although I can still show these modern-day pale faced youngsters a thing or two, I wanted to be a pirate but well, that career never passed muster. So here I am now with a story to tell from my distant past!
I was the proud Master of a brand new bulk carrier recently out of China and on our maiden voyage we headed down from ‘yellow peril’ country where the ship had been built and with a cargo of coal bound for Genoa, Italy. We passed Indonesia and up the Malacca Straits which was certainly pirate territory but at the time of the incident we happened to be in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Our fine vessel was plodding along at about 8 knots, at least 700 miles from land and although my company and the media could never quite grasp how pirates happened to be so far from the safety of the shores believe me it was an ordeal that I would never want to repeat.
Prior to the incident pirates had been hitting the headlines nearly every week, a ship here and a ship there – but I prepared my crew as best possible. I mean that is my job after-all! For the two weeks prior to arriving at the Malacca Straits we constructed contingency plans, conducted drills and everybody from the Chief Engineer to the Wiper, the Master to the Cook had a task and new exactly what to do, when to do it and how to do it! We all had extremely important roles to play, manning fire hoses to ward off the attackers, locking doors and preparing rations should we have to hide (if the pirates got on-board) and to calling for help over the radio’s. I even had the cook ready to make Molotov cocktails from empty beer bottles and paraffin!
We practised a few of those on the way across as there is an art to making one, lighting it and throwing it before anything happens – certainly the cook now knows the best way to do this after setting fire to his trousers! He spent a week in bed after that occurrence!
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