A Captain's Duty

time you’re guiding them away from the really important stuff, like radar or the engine controls. Not to mention the other crew.”
    “Got it,” Colin said.
    “And, last of all, humor helps.”
    I looked at an AB.
    “Unfortunately,” I said, “none of you guys are funny. So rule number one: don’t get taken hostage by pirates.”
    I’d always felt if pirates got onboard, it was all over. We had to stop them before they got on the ship.
    We were paralleling the coast of Somalia by now. I went back to my room and wrote up my night orders. Every captain has standing orders for the entire trip. They’re posted on the first day and never change. But night orders cover any special messages or duties that need to be addressed during each overnight shift. “We’re still in Apache country,” I wrote that evening. “We’re on our own, so we need to make sure we stay vigilant. All we have is each other out here.” You have to come at the crew in new ways to keep them interested. I knew the pirates had their attention now, so I kept it short.
    I went to my room. At about 3:30 a.m., I was asleep on my bunk when the phone rang.
    It was the second mate, Ken, who was on the 12 a.m. to 4 a.m., the “dog watch.”
    “Cap, I think you better get up here.”
    “What is it?” I said.
    “Somali pirates,” he said.
    “Where?”
    “On the radio,” he said. “They’re talking on the radio.”
    “I’ll be right there.”
    I hurried out to the passageway and climbed the internal ladder up to the bridge level. Clouds scudded past a full moon as I emerged into the fresh air.
    I pulled open the door on the bridge and there was Ken with an AB standing watch with him. I was about to say something when I heard a voice.
    “This is Somali pirate,” it said. “Somali pirate.”
    I looked at Ken. His eyes were wide as saucers. I looked down. The radio was tuned to Channel 16, the international hail and distress channel.
    “Somali pirate, Somali pirate, I’m coming to get you.”
    It was spooky. The voice was recognizably African. I hadn’t spent enough time on the continent to tell a Somali accent from a Kenyan one, but it sounded authentic. More than that, it sounded like the guy was serious.
    “What happened?”
    “I saw a ship go by about seven miles away. It was very well lit up.” I nodded. Fishing boats are always lit up like Christmas trees, to get some illumination on the men working the nets, and to avoid being run down by some tanker doing fifteenknots. A pirate ship would rarely have all those lights going. It burned up too much precious fuel and allowed them to be seen on the horizon, which they never wanted to happen.
    “And then a few minutes later, I heard this,” Ken said, pointing at the radio.
    I picked up the binoculars. There was a boat about seven miles away, astern, on our starboard quarter, its lights blazing like a typical fishing boat. But I looked closer and could see that it had a second boat tied to its stern.
    “Somali pirate, Somali pirate,” the voice came over the radio again, filling up the dead silence of the bridge. The guy was almost chanting. What the hell was he playing at? The Somalis were known for their stealth; the last thing they would do is alert you that they were on the way. It didn’t make sense.
    It could have just been a couple of fishermen having fun with us. Or it could have been pirates who’d swept past for a look at our security profile. They could be sitting up ahead, trying to unnerve us before gunning their engines and heading back to intercept our ship. Like I said, these guys were constantly innovating, constantly probing for weak points.
    I studied the ship in the glasses. It wasn’t under way. It was drifting, which is a typical thing for a fishing boat to do.
    “Let’s go to a hundred and twenty revs,” I said. We were doing our normal RPMs of 118.
    “One hundred twenty revs,” the second mate called. He was on the EOT, the Engine Order Telegraph, controlling our speed.
    “What’s our course?” I said.
    “Two hundred thirty,” the helmsman said. Meaning a heading of 230 degrees.
    “Bring it over to one eighty,” I said. I wanted to make a drastic course correction that the pirate—if that’s what he was—would recognize, to show him we knew he was up ahead waiting for us. And I wanted him as far astern as possible.
    “Left five to one hundred and eighty,” Ken called out. The quartermaster called it back and swung the wheel