American Sailor boy and the pirate escape

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I am in Marina Portoroz - Slovenia. The glass of golden wine is full of reflections of boat masts. It's, six o'clock, the sun sets, a working day is over, for now. Captains to the docked boats , open a beer, light a cigarette, but once they sit down to rest, they begin to notice how the neighbor's lines are neater than those of their own ship, so by the nature of male ego, they begin to compete.

They wrap the ropes, organise them into geometric perfection, the yachts are of the same lengths so it is important each captain maintains his boat as elegant as he can. I do not know whether this is because there is a lady watching. Sailors who spend a lot of şolitary time on the oceans love to hear sounds of female giggles back on land. When the ladies are present they stop swearing and folowing the sailor code always tell stories which bid the ladies bat their lashes, raise their eyebrows, enchanted by heroism's and adventures of the alpha males who are at that moment most probably thinking about breasts.

For dinner, an Australian Capetian whose father a vestern film style bank robber and who has sailed all the seas, re-introduced me to my peer from Rhodes Island also a captain.

"Did you tell her the story about the pirates?" He asked the American.

"No," replied the young man.

Actually,he had not had time to process that particular subject, as he had been busy showing movies of underwater swimming with sharks in BoraBora, photos from Galapagos, Antigua, New Zealand's snow-capped mountains ,and caves which explode with natural waterfalls, as well as those of green South American jungles, him surfing the gigantic waves of Hawaii, and snowboarding.

The most unusual of all was a movie he filmed in Ethiopia of the locals using a crane to pick up camels from the ground and transport them trough the air and on to a ship, set for Mecca. The camels where mooing and pooing from the sky on to the people who where hitting them with sticks..

The american captain had also had played several songs on the spanish guitar, cooked up a pasta, and did not fail to explain the symbolism of the tribal tattoos on his muscular shoulder, all without his friend being aware of how the seemingly shy boy, progressively advanced unoticed .

"Well, I won't tell that story now," - answered modestly the young Capetian who survived the Somali pirates, but he did recount it after all.

"I was transporting this boat through the Gulf of Aden. The attacks were so mediatised at the time on TV , we thought that the pirates had retreated. Night fell. We had the radio tuned on, and after dusk the drama began . All night trough the darkness we heard the screams of people whose boats where atacked. Sounds of machine guns. Saw bursts of light in the immediate vicinity. We kept sending coordinates of the attacked ships to the American forces. We sailed the darkness with our lights off .The blood froze in the veins out of fear.

When dawn came, we were relieved, happy to see the sun feeling saved. At the horizon appeared a silhouette of a black speedboat. Deep in the ocean where there is nothing, it was clear to whom the boat belongs. They rushed towards us, and we full steam headed for the opposite direction. But from that direction a second speed boat headed toward us. Via VHF MAYDAY we sent our coordinates the U.S. warships that are hiding in the bay, but noone responded to our call. Full speed we targeted the direction between the pirate speedboats, but speed-boats came up so close we could make out the faces of men with machine guns. The moment arrived. There was no where to run. We gave up the struggle, and faced being kidnapped and sold for a great sum to our homelands.

Two U.S. military planes appeared suddenly out of no where. They began shooting into the sea around the speedboats, all the while circulating around our ship. Plane wings almost dug into the sea as they turned abruptly and almost brought down our mast. The planes circulated around us, preventing the pirates from getting closer. They guarded us until we made it to our destination. We were lucky. "

My steak got cold, I had not had a bite. The second plate of shrimp arrived to the Australian captain. News reports on the restaurant television replayed reports of Somali pirate attacks, I got goose bumps, horrific television images where much more frightening than the fairy tale I've just heard from the sailors at dinner. The boys did not even notice,they where engrossed in exchanging recipes of a rainbow colored tropical fish from distant ocean called mahi-mahi .

Marinas are types of kinetic cites which change shape and population from hour to hour. New people with salty hair and skin, hungry for some human companionship, quickly make friends, and just have enough time to exchange stories of distant shores , check the weather, before having to answer to the wind that comes to take them away.

It is the morning after now, i am writing this, on a russian boat, registered in London, with an English captian and his lady, a head full of new stories, sailing south east down the Adriatic