Anyone want to sail through the Gulf of Aden? You might die. | Hacker News Reader

Anyone want to sail through the Gulf of Aden? You might die.

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15 pointspeteforde11 comments

I'm going for it if he accepts me. I have some basic training experience in the Canadian Army(bum ankle). The chance to fire an AK and make a little cash while sailing around that part of the world...hell ya.

Except if you are a US citizen other's tax dollars will have to be spent to rescue you anyway.

Why not plot a less stressful and more respectful course. Otherwise please do not send out a mayday.

I'm not excusing or condoning the (REAL) pirates behavior but they are doing that kind of stuff out of desperation since their country has zero economy, etc. You can't reason with crazy desperate.

At some point somebody has to stop the pirates we can't accept mid-eval behavior like that. Considering that this is way cheaper than a full war and that there are already warships of the cost of Somalia, this is likely to be a lot cheaper.

The UN/NATO is going to have a stop them, a few private individuals won't be able to and they'll get killed in the process.

Go watch the 60 Minutes documentary on this, the pirates keep upgrading their weapons by stealing larger and larger ships that happen to have them. I know virtually nothing about weapons but I suspect an AK-47 is not going to do much against a surface-to-surface missile or grenade launcher like I saw in the segment. They almost stole some tanks but the navy made it clear if they didn't return them they would sink the ship before they could get them to shore.

Militarily, I think a large commercial ship with existing radar and maybe cheap UAV support, and small arms, would be capable of defending itself from the pirates -- they generally raid in small craft, using AK-47s and RPGs, and rely on speed and the lack of resistance.

A small sailboat is probably too small to be defensible.

They should yes, but the western countries are not willing to do what has to be done - they are too skirmish of violence, and some are floating ideas of economical development or foreign aid.

They have entirely forgotten why their boats have weapons.

The only hn relevant thing to say here is that northern Somalia (somaliland) has some of the cheapest and best international telephony in Africa, thanks to some pirate gsm providers and satellite VoIP backhaul.

Cool. The crew can do some war driving as well as, uh, war fighting.

This is clearly insane, but god I'd love to do it...

So why don't you? It's looks like one life time opportunity.

Anyone want to come hiking with me through Iran?

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