Customer Reviews

Pirates Aboard!: Forty Cases of Piracy Today and What Bluewater Cruisers Can Do About It

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Think of pirates and movies and acting - or ancient times - comes readily to mind; but truth is, piracy is alive and well on the high seas today and even can be a threat to modern sailors. That's why PIRATES ABOARD! 40 CASES OF PIRACY TODAY AND WHAT BLUEWATER CRUISERS CAN DO ABOUT IT is so key to sailing safety. The author interviewed the victims of over 40 cases, asking them what lessons they learned and how they'd avoid or survive similar encounters: their responses offer invaluable lessons for any braving the high seas today.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

The book captures individual experiences of different cruisers in different areas of the world and reveals what they learned from their experiences and shares this with the reader. If you are considering cruising it is well worth the read.

THis book offers a good insight to piracy against cruisers and offers a variety of tips and advice on what cruisers can do to minimize their risk of being overtaken. Unfortunately, this book did not address motor-cruisers ("passagemakers"), which leads the reader to think that motorcruisers are immune to piracy???? Overall, a worthy read.

In the introduction Klaus Hympendahl is singing the praises of the Internet and e-mail and makes this tribute
"I therefore dedicate this book to Tim Berner-Lee, developer of the Internet who, very sadly, died before his time. Without his pioneering achievements, this book could not have been written."

First of all Sir Tim Berners-Lee is as far as I can investigate still very much alive and still inventing at MIT, Mass. Berner has an "s" and he was not just a developer of the internet, he INVENTED the World Wide Web while at CERN the European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1989. He has worldwide credentials. He is also a Brit, graduated from Oxford and was at Emanuel School in South London, where my son was also a pupil. In 2004 he was Knighted by H.M. the Queen. As a former journalist I am shocked that such a momentous statement could be made without checking the facts.

Is there anything else in the book that has not been checked for accuracy? I'm now hesitant to read it at all.

This 2003 publication contains a series of examples grouped geographically. The final chapter offers practical advice to "Bluewater Cruisers." Its too old to discuss the current Somali pirates, but it does have some interesting cases of Somali piracy from 1999. This would be well before Somali pirates were regularly making the news and collecting multi-million dollar ransoms. It does give a very good flavor of what modern piracy and pirates are like.

The "practical advice" reads like a list of things the author was told during interviews with captains and crews of ships. While the advice is sometimes helpful, it is not a detailed discussion based on empirical evidence.

Another shortcoming with the book is a lack of an index. This is not as dramatic of an omission as it could have been since the book is generally well organized.

I suggest before you sell the house, buy a sailboat, and launch that world cruise you've always dreamed about, you get to know the neighborhood. Get your hands on a copy of Klaus Hympendahl's "Pirates Aboard." This is a non-fiction survey of real, modern piracy attacks and a de-briefing styled discussion of the aftermath. Klaus IDs specific piracy hotspots, tells why they are hotspots, relates what is known about each attack, and returns to the dilemma yachters face in trying to decide whether to keep weapons on board. The individual accounts are well-written and digestable. I used his book as one of the sources for my new novel, "Arcturus," which does involve pirates--both contemporary and in history. Arcturus: A Jack McDonald Novel About Soldiers, Spies, Pirates, and Terrorists with Romantic and Historical Twists