Feral Jundi

   If you are the owner of a shipping company, and your ship’s routes go anywhere near Africa, then you should be hiring armed security to protect your ships and crews.  To not defend your boats, is pathetic and damn near criminal.  I say criminal, because you are purposely sending people into harms way, without giving them adequate protection.  It is stupid and this is not taking care of your people.  What this is called, is putting more value on money and minimizing liability, and putting zero value on the lives of your crew, and that is criminal in my book. The security companies and consultants that continue to promote the concept of ‘no weapons’ on ships, are pathetic as well. It is terrible advice and it is not protecting these crews and boats, and it is advice that only caters to the financial goals of these companies. Ship captains need to speak up as well, because your crew is depending on you to do everything in your power to protect them.

   The only winner in this whole deal, are the pirates.  They have completely exploited this weakness in the shipping industry, and the ineffectual maritime strategy.  They are thumbing their noses at us all, and I see them continuing their wonderful business strategy.  It works, and they are making some good money–why should they stop? pffft. 

   I also believe the current maritime strategy to combat these pirates, is completely lacking.  What good is naval security, when it is 100′s of miles away?  What naval strategist thought that this was an adequate method of protection?  It would be like sending a principle out in his car in the worst areas of Iraq, with no PSD team, and telling him to call when he is in trouble. I wouldn’t do this on the roads of Iraq, and I wouldn’t do this off the coast of Somalia.  The Gulf of Aden is clearly dangerous, and certainly requires armed security on each boat.  If anything, the security on each boat could allow enough time during the fight, for a Quick Reaction Force to come to the rescue.  That’s if a naval QRF force could close the distance fast enough.  But really, how embarrassing if this is the best strategy folks can come up with?  

   Either way, both the naval strategy and the shipping company strategy is not working, and the pirates are still able to do their thing.  Put a fully armed Maritime Security Detail on each boat and make this happen.  And if there are issues with being armed while going through various country’s waters, then post a ship in international waters that can fly these MSD teams on to the boats when the time is right.    

   And these MSD teams should be adequately armed and trained to handle this stuff.  That means having something bigger than a Glock 19 or a smoke grenade on the boat.  I am talking about something that has reach and can sink a boat.  Do the math, and let your imagination go with it.  I have mentioned several weapon possibilities, and the time is over for messing around.  How many more boats and crews are we going to allow to be taken by these clowns?  Pathetic I say. -Matt 

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Somali pirates find US ship _ and a fight

By CHARLES J. HANLEY 

04/08/09

The equatorial sun had just passed high noon Wednesday when a text message flashed on reporters’ cell phones in Nairobi: 17,000-ton boxship seized 400 miles off Somali coast.

The informants, a local Kenyan seamen’s group, then added this startling note: All 20 crewmen were American.

The tropical seas off Somalia had grown treacherous with pirates in recent years. In 2008, the seaborne marauders stormed and seized a record number of commercial vessels, a giant Saudi supertanker among them, though never an American crew.

The high-seas hijackings, generating tens of millions of dollars in ransoms for the pirates, had eased off early this year, as a U.S.-led international naval force aggressively patrolled the Gulf of Aden. When they managed to mount attacks, the Somali pirates were left in ships’ wakes, foiled nine out of 10 times.

It was a lull during which Shane Murphy, a veteran of east African sea lanes as first mate of the U.S.-flagged freighter Maersk Alabama, returned home to talk to a class at his alma mater about this 21st-century scourge.

He told the Massachusetts Maritime Academy students he thought the pirates “knew better than to go against the American ships,” one recalled.

Then last Saturday the lull ended. A French tourist yacht and a German commercial ship were taken off the Somali coast. On Sunday, it was a Yemeni tug, and on Monday British and Taiwanese ships were seized. At the regional U.S. Navy headquarters in Bahrain, the command saw a new phase in the battle opening.

“Merchant mariners should be increasingly vigilant,” warned the U.S.-led Combined Maritime Forces, a coalition of more than nine nations deploying three dozen warships in that perilous western corner of the Indian Ocean. The scope of the problem was huge, it said, with too few patrols to watch over a piece of ocean as big as the Mediterranean and Red seas combined.

On Wednesday, it was Murphy’s Maersk Alabama cruising through those waters, a relatively small, 500-foot-long container ship, carrying 401 containers of food aid, bound from Oman and Djibouti for Mombasa, Kenya’s main port. At the helm was Capt. Richard Phillips, a man who, his wife would say later in the day, would “do what he needs to do to keep the crew safe.”

Seas were calm and winds light, reported the weather bureau in the nearby Seychelles islands. It was pirate weather, more benign than the earlier storms and swells that helped frustrate the marine criminals, who use swift but light and fragile skiffs to chase down their prey.

The texting tip from the seafarers’ association was followed quickly at midday Wednesday by confirmation from diplomatic sources and the Danish-owned Maersk line itself: Capt. Phillips’ Alabama was the day’s chief prey, seized some 280 miles (450 kilometers) southeast of Eyl, northeast Somalia.

The 20 crewmen would be the first American hostages taken by pirates in recent memory — if they allowed themselves to be taken.

“I always hoped it wasn’t going to happen to us,” Phillips’ wife, Andrea, said later Wednesday at her Vermont home. “I just got an e-mail from him and knew he was heading into Mombasa. He had even made the comment that pirate activity was picking up.”

Only sketchy information trickled in as the day wore on — from Maersk, the U.S. Navy and sporadic satellite-telephone contact that relatives and reporters made with the crew.

Murphy’s father, Joseph, who teaches at the Massachusetts academy, told Boston station WBZ he learned that the attackers had chased the Maersk Alabama for three to five hours, periodically opening fire with automatic weapons, before the assailants — said to be four in number — managed to board.

Any help was distant; the Navy said its closest warship was 345 miles away. But the crew — believed to be unarmed except for fire hoses — somehow fended them off, and themselves grabbed one of the pirates.

As the sun sank in late afternoon, a crew member called the Maersk line’s offices to report, “We are safe,” company CEO John F. Reinhart told reporters at his Norfolk, Va., headquarters. But he added that the call was cut off and “they did not say the pirates are off the vessel.”

A standoff ensued, and around sunset off east Africa an unidentified crewman gave The Associated Press the news by satellite phone: The pirates still held Capt. Phillips.

Back in rural Vermont, the captain’s sister-in-law filled in one important detail — that Phillips was a volunteer hostage.

“What I understand is that he offered himself as the hostage, so that to keep the rest of the crew safe,” Gina Coggio, 29, told reporters, saying she had gotten updates from the State Department and via the Internet. “That is what he would do. It’s just who he is and his response as a captain.”

The ship’s second mate, Ken Quinn, later told CNN that the crew thought it had negotiated an exchange — Phillips for the captured pirate. But when the Americans released their captive after 12 hours, the Somalis failed to release the captain, he said. The pirates and Phillips were now in one of the freighter’s lifeboats off the side, he said, while the American crew sought to free their captain with offers of food — without success.

As the drama played out, the Navy’s USS Bainbridge churned from hundreds of miles away toward the scene. The destroyer arrived a few hours before dawn Thursday near the boxship and the boat with the pirates, according to Kevin Speers, a spokesman for the company that owns the Maersk Alabama.

Although the Navy runs escort convoys in the region, the Maersk Alabama was not part of one. “The area we’re patrolling is more than a million (square) miles in size. Our ships cannot be everywhere at every time,” said Navy spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen.

A dozen other ships, with more than 200 crew members, are currently in Somali pirate hands, reports the International Maritime Bureau, a piracy watchdog group based in Malaysia. The bureau has reported 66 attacks since January.

Jim Wilson, Middle East correspondent for Fairplay International Shipping Magazine, saw a “business cycle” at work, after the pirates earned tens of millions last year in ransoms.

“A lot of the vessels that had been taken have been previously released, so like any other businessman, when you’re out of stock, what do you do? You go and get more stock,” he said. “The Somali pirates are businessmen.”

And the crew of the Maersk Alabama are professionals, said Joseph Murphy, who said he believed his son would continue his career at sea once this week’s episode ends.

“You’ve got to get the job done,” the father said. “This is another day at work.”

Story Here

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Glance at anti-piracy ship patrols off Somalia

By The Associated Press 

There are about two dozen warships at any one time on international anti-piracy patrols off the Horn of Africa. The following ships are currently off Somalia:

_The U.S.-led Combined Task Force 151 normally has about a dozen vessels on station off Somalia, but this number varies considerably. Its flagship, the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer, can carry up to 42 aircraft and about 1,800 Marines.

_The NATO flotilla, known as Standing NATO Maritime Group 1, comprises 5 ships.

_Portuguese frigate NRP Corte Real, flotilla flagship;

-Canadian frigate HMCS Winnipeg;

-Dutch frigate HNLMS De Zeven Provincien;

-Spanish frigate ESPS Blas de Lezo;

-The frigate USS Halyburton.

_The European Union task force consists of 5 vessels:

-Spanish frigate SPS Numancia, the task force flagship;

-Spanish fleet tanker SPS Marquis de la Ensenada;

-French frigate FS Floreal;

-German supply ship FGS Spessart;

-German frigate Rheinland-Pfalz.

Other forces contributing ships to the international anti-piracy patrols include the Chinese, Indian, Malaysian, Russian and Japanese navies.

Story Here