Word: gulf
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...more difficult than boarding a moving bus," says Vikas Kapoor, a former chief officer on a Hong Kong-registered container ship, of the frequent hijackings he witnessed and heard of in the Gulf of Aden during his stint onboard last year. "The pirates come at you firing rocket launchers. You can outpace them if you're a fast, high-decked container. Otherwise you'll have to slow down or risk being blown up. Then they'll bring out their ladders, climb onto your deck, guns in hand, and it's all over in seven to eight minutes." Describing the passage...
...relative to the amount of education required. Even amid the present economic gloom, officers' salaries have not plunged due to a shortage of qualified people. Indians and Filipinos are most in demand on international vessels because they speak English. But many Indian seafarers are now refusing to do the Gulf of Aden run. "Sailors are very apprehensive, very jerky," says Sunil Nair, spokesman for the Mumbai-based National Union of Seafarers of India (NUSI), which has some 80,000 members. He says that since the spate of hijackings last year - when there were 72 attacks and 52 hijackings - more sailors...
...pirates, largely from lawless coastal Somali towns, have basically turned the heavily traveled route through the Gulf of Aden into a toll road that shippers' insurance firms have been willing to pay for (up to $3 million for a single vessel). About 20,000 merchant ships traverse the waterway each year; there have already been 74 attacks and 15 hijackings in 2009, compared with 111 attacks last year. The pirates generally want cash, not trouble. They've treated their hostages well, and violence has been rare. All of that changed, of course, last week when a quartet of Somalis seized...
...Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged on Monday that rescuing hostages - in this case, Navy snipers took out Phillips' three captors - is only a stopgap way of dealing with the pirates now sailing the Gulf of Aden. "There is no purely military solution to it," Gates told an audience of the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va. "It is a serious international problem, and it's probably going to get worse." (See pictures of the U.S. and France fighting the Somali pirates...
...will not be stopped until order is brought to the country, a classic failed state which has been without a government for more than 15 years. Murphy, the Maersk Alabama's second-in-command, said the responsibility also lies with the U.S. government, whose ships have been patrolling the Gulf of Aden as part of a multinational task force. "We'd like to implore President Obama to use all his resources and increase the commitment to ending this Somali pirate scourge," said Murphy, the Maersk Alabama's second-in-command. "Wake up. This crew was lucky...