Mmmmmmmm... pirates!
Posted on 11/17/2008 5:37:30 AM PST by DeaconBenjamin
Alas this is a bad year. We have had drought and I was unable to collect but one...... all cinnamon.
What the heck are these “pirates” going to do with this huge ship? Take a joy ride? Or, more realistically, ask for ransom or threaten to sink it near a shore - major enviro disaster. They should be taken out...soon.
Three times the size??!! A Nimitz-class carrier with its full compliment of aircraft is a 100,000+ ton vessel. A 300,000 ton tanker? I highly doubt it. If someone has better information, please present it.
318,000 Deadweight tons
Not the biggest that Aramco runs, but close.
For comparison:
Batillus class supertankers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batillus_class_supertankers
555,000 metric tons of deadweight (DWT) and a 414 meters length.
“I’ve always wanted to be a pirate.”
Buy a poofy shirt, get an eye patch and go arggghh.
They’re basically doing it for ransom money. Could be there’s hostages in their home port which would complicate any attack.
Thanks for the link. It’s interesting how fast they were scrapped. Some less than 10 years old.
Pirates don't "buy" anything.
Please no photo of rosie o-donut as a whale “blowing it out”...I just had lunch. Thansk in advance!
It is hard to understand their size. Few pictures give enough reference for scale.
http://www.aukevisser.nl/supertankers/id22.htm
I guess they were headed for the Mozambique Channel. I would not, normally, consider this to be the Arabian Sea. It seems more like the Indian Ocean.
In any case, these Somalis are a long way from home. I don’t think this tanker was heading for the Suez. Even after pumping out half the load, it would still be too big. It’s either too deep or too tall, one or the other.
Not enough to do an analysis, I guess. You get a few of those, and I would be laying in a large supply of firewood. Which is not such a bad idea, anyway...
“Pirates don’t “buy” anything.”
They rent it for Saturday night out in the Village.
450 NM SE of Mombasa is hardly The Arabian Sea. It is the Indian Ocean. As a matter of fact, if the SE heading is correct, that tanker was on the beach.
So much for MSM fact-checking. I wonder if they meant "Mumbai" which is the sensitive way to spell "Bombay?"
Whatever happened to the other ship taken by pirates where some of them died aboard ship of some mysterious ailment?
Whatever happened to the other ship taken by pirates where some of them died aboard ship of some mysterious ailment?
Pittsburgh?
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