Pirates fire at U.S. Navy ship off Somalia

Reuters ^ | May 7, 2009

[<1/1,000,000th%]

LOL!

[envisio]

“”Apparently you were never transported aboard a USNS vessel”””

Thats right.
To us land lubbers, a US Navy Ship is a US Navy Ship.

[budwiesest]

Here are some neat shots of Fleet Week 2007:

http://home.comcast.net/~bzee1a/

[Billthedrill]

Naw, they couldn't ram a skiff with that thing if they tried. I conned one one time. It's be like chasing a skateboarder with a bus.

The boys did the right thing - just kick it up a notch and steam off. Even nominally "unarmed" USNS vessels often have a little something in the paint locker just in case. But why risk losing one of your people to a lucky shot when you can just boogie and thumb your nose at them?

[ExSoldier]

You both make excellent points. I stand corrected. I know nothing about vessels that size. I grew up in South Florida but the extent of my blue water experience is in sailing vessels 40-50 feet in length. I used to crew for family friends over summer vacations to the Bahamas. Later on in the 1980s (the era of Carribbean Piracy against luxury yachts) I did the same thing but for some nominal pay and I brought some firepower (semi auto handguns and rifles) & parachute flares for unwelcome midnight boarders. Those times were fairly lucrative and mostly uneventful for me. Just like any insurance policy. You pay for it but know the odds of actually needing it are remote.

[dennisw]

The scurvy dogs should have been dispatched to Davey Jones locker! Arrrrgggggg

[Billthedrill]

I remember those days. Anyone who wasn’t armed was insane.

[ExSoldier]

I remember those days. Anyone who wasn’t armed was insane.

I most often crewed a center cockpit Morgan Out Isle 46' and you know what's really weird? I remember that the folks who were most heavily armed were the power boaters. The big Bertrams, Hatteras' and Chris Craft yachts were loaded fer bear. But the folks under sail looked down their long noses and sniffed that guns were so evil and can't we all just get along? Sailors are in their hearts the beatniks and hippies of the cruising world. It's still that way, too!

My buddies dad owned the boat. Made his money the old fashioned way: Inheritance. This guy was a pilot for the AAF & used to fly the "Hump" over the Himalayas during WWII in the C47s. He would pick up a 1911 .45 or some other gun for $25 every time he landed someplace. When he passed away in the mid 1980s, he left his kid (my buddy) a safe full of very valuable firearms! I remember, he had a .375 H&H Magnum he kept on board permanently. Called it his engine room solution! So that family was an exception to the snooty sailing crowd.

Sailors run a much bigger risk for piracy. They can't run anywhere very fast. Their gunwales are low to the water and by the nature of their displacement hulls they are very stable underway. This makes getting next to them for an unfriendly boarding exercise much easier than trying to board a rolling pitching planing type hull as those found on power boats.

[DeLaine]

We do NOT have a metrosexual Navy. Politicians have hampered them, that’s true, but they are still military and manly (ok, as a whole, as much as they can be)

Navy family ping

[BootsOfEscaping]

WTF is going on in the world when the US Navy speeds away from pirates firing on one of our ships??!!

I don’t know how much more I can take before I move to a deserted island!