The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [70]
It is hard to fault the Biscaglia’s guards for choosing to save their own lives rather than dying in a senseless last stand—they were, after all, involved in a gunfight armed with nothing more than a glorified bullhorn. LRADs, it turns out, are far more suited to crowd control than repelling armed sea bandits; they have an effective range of less than three hundred metres—inferior to that of an AK-47—and the fact that they can be trained on only one target at a time is a serious limitation when the standard pirate attack pattern involves a two-skiff team. Luckily, the three guards were eventually rescued by a German naval helicopter. The crew of the Biscaglia were not so fortunate; they spent the next two months in the company of their Somali captors.
The Biscaglia spelled the death of the LRAD as a valid counter-piracy defence, as Lloyd’s List, the world’s forefront maritime trade journal, published an article blasting the device’s effectiveness.8 It was also the end for APMSS; after the embarrassing incident, owner Nick Davis dissolved the company.
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Individual crews have occasionally come up with their own creative methods of dealing with pirate attacks. When seven pirates armed with heavy machine guns and RPGs boarded the Chinese fishing ship Zhenhua 4 on December 17, 2008, they probably thought that the difficult part was over. Instead, the Zhenhua’s thirty-member crew unleashed a ragtag assault, blasting the invaders with water cannons, improvised Molotov cocktails, and even beer bottles.9 After half an hour, the cowed pirates signalled for a ceasefire, barely making it back to their skiffs before a Malaysian warship appeared on the scene and opened fire. No members of the Zhenhua’s crew were injured during the battle.
The Zhenhua’s crew were likely aware that only their own reckless courage would save their ship from becoming the latest addition to the pirates’ fleet of motherships, and themselves from indentured servitude or worse. Most shipping companies, however, would expressly forbid their sailors to escalate the situation through active resistance. Passive measures, on the other hand, such as barbed wire, electric fences, blocking stairwells, and barring windows, have all been employed at various times, with differing degrees of success. But two defensive techniques have stood out above these others, owing to their relatively low cost, simplicity, and high degree of effectiveness.
The first is merely the stationing of extra watches on deck. On most commercial vessels, it is standard to have the officer of the watch on the bridge, and perhaps one additional lookout to assist the watchkeeper. This status quo puts crews transiting through pirateinfested waters at unacceptable risk, according to Andrew Linington, a UK spokesman for the international maritime union Nautilus. Due to the intense cost competitiveness of the international maritime shipping industry, he says, crew sizes have been significantly reduced over the last thirty years; in the 1970s, medium to large container ships commonly had crews of twenty-five or more, but recent years have seen many vessels reduced to running on skeleton crews of eleven to fifteen. “Manning levels have been reduced so much, and workloads have been increased so much, that people struggle to do their jobs as it is,” he told me. “One of the biggest problems we have at sea today is simply fatigue.”
Linington was adamant that early detection is the single best method of deterring pirate attacks. “Talk to any naval officer,” he said, “and they will all tell you the same thing: the ships that are most successful at resisting attacks are the ones who spot the pirates coming early … Often if the pirates recognize that they’ve been detected early on, and they see the ship taking evasive action, they will not even bother to attack. And the