Patrolling for Pirates

You may have thought the characters of Long John Silver and Captain Hook were merely fictional characters only to be found within the confines of illustrated fairy tales, on the contrary, piracy remains a profitable and active pastime. As I discovered this weekend...

When we get opportunity some of us on the ship like to wander over to the neighboring cargo ships to have to tour. The guaranteed ticket onto other ships is including a few girls in the group because most of the sailors haven't seen women for a few months and get pretty excited about a few pretty faces. My friend Neville (one of our pursers on the ship, our 2 pursers have the very important job of keeping us in good standing with the immigration officials of Ghana) arranged for us to go patrolling on one of the port boats. This particular boat resembled a tug boat but is able to go at a pretty good speed. What I didn't realize until we were given a tour of bottom level of the boat where there was a small locked room, is that the purpose of this particular boat is to patrol outside the harbor for pirates who idle up next to the large cargo ships, climb up their anchors and try to blackmail the crew in order to get fuel and other valuable commoditites. If pirates are found trying to sneak onto other ships they are promptly taken into custody by port security and locked up. The image that instantly came to mind when I heard the word "pirate" was a bearded man with a peg-leg, a black patch over one eye and a squawking green parrot on his right shoulder. I am sad to say we did not come across any pirates, I was really hoping we would. The most exciting thing we encoutered was a dead sea turtle. But...Kojo, our new security friend did take us to the fishing harbor where we got a tour of a fishing trawler. It's hard to fully describe the scene of dockfull of bustling African men with rubber boots up to their knees and sea-soaked pants, throwing fish, swabbing wet wooden decks and being ordered around by an angry Korean man wearing jeans and a baseball cap. As the only girl among all these men and one of the two white people I felt a bit conspicuous walking up the rickety wooden gangway and excusing my way through the crowd of fishermen and down into the smelly hold. Our security friend was determined to get us a free fish to take back with us but thank goodness the angry Korean man said no because I am really not sure what we would have done with it once we arrived back to the ship. Out tour ended back at the main harbor with an open invitation to patrol with them anytime. Maybe next time we will happen upon some pirates...