More on pirates

CNN.com has the story of real-life piracy:

The British Royal Navy has found the yacht belonging to a British couple missing in the Indian Ocean since last week, but the yacht was empty, the British Ministry of Defence said Thursday. A ministry spokesman said it appeared the couple, who are feared kidnapped by pirates, had been transferred to another vessel. "There's nothing to indicate that they've been harmed," said the spokesman, who asked not to be named in line with policy. The yacht was found in international waters, but the spokesman refused to give a more exact location.
Paul and Rachel Chandler set off from the Seychelles for Tanzania on 21 October on their 38-foot-yacht, the Lynn Rival, according to their blog. They have not been heard from since, but a distress beacon was activated on 23 October, according to naval officials.
International military forces have been treating the case as a "potential hijacking", Lieutenant Ian Jones of Britain's Royal Navy told CNN. "We have no confirmation that anything has been pirated," he added. There are many possibilities, he said, adding he was aware of the reports of piracy but that hijacking was "far from certain".
Britain's Foreign Office issued a statement this week saying it is "extremely concerned for their safety," while pointing out it had not confirmed reports they were taken captive.
Pirates have been very active off the east coast of Africa in the past several years, operating out of lawless Somalia.
Two vessels were attacked the day after the Chandlers set sail. One of them, a cargo ship, was successfully boarded and seized off the Seychelles, while the other fought off its attackers near the Kenyan coast.
On Thursday, pirates attacked and boarded a Thai-flagged fishing vessel about 200 miles north of the Seychelles, according to the European Union Naval Force. EU NAVFOR aircraft spotted the pirates onboard and said the vessel now appears to be heading toward the Somali coast. The Thai vessel is the eighth ship held by criminals at the Somali coastline, EU NAVFOR said. Attacks in the region have significantly increased this year, according to the International Maritime Bureau, which monitors shipping crimes. But successful attacks have gone down as a result of a strong presence of international monitors.
The first nine months of this year has seen more pirate attacks than all of last year, the bureau reported 21 October. From 1 January until 30 September, pirates worldwide mounted 306 attacks, compared with 293 in all of 2008, it said. More than half of this year's attacks were carried out by suspected Somali pirates off the east coast of Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden, a major shipping route between Yemen and Somalia. Out of those attacks, Somali pirates successfully hijacked 32 vessels and took 533 hostages. Eight people were wounded, four were killed and one is missing, the bureau said.

But it certainly sounds like it's high time for some Q-ships to lie off Somalia, attract some pirates, and blow the shit out of them. Of course, you can go buy Rico's book on the subject, too: