Avast Ye Scurvy Dogs

A large French luxury yacht has been seized by pirates off the coast of Somalia.

While I feel for the 30 crew members currently held hostage, I have to admit I greatly question the series of events that led to it’s capture.

The prices to take a 10 day jaunt on this ship start at $3465. It holds 64 passengers and crews 30 people. We’ll go with the base price for the income of the ship ( I am sure the big cabins probably go for 10k for the 10 days but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt). We’ll assume 80% of the time they are carrying passengers and not moving the ship with crew only to different locations.

This gives them roughly 6.5 million a year in gross income. With a crew of 30 we’ll average the salaries out to 50k a year. We all know the captain is getting 100k+ but we also all know that the cabin boys are only making 25k, let’s get real.

This takes the ship down to 5 million a year coming in.

Port fees, maintenance, food, fuel (it is a sail based ship but they will run on motor a fair bit) , registry, insurance and overall ship expenses I am going to be generous and give them 2 million a year. (I’d be surprised if the amount exceeded 1.2 million to be truthful , but I want to flesh this out.)

So this leaves the ship bringing in 3 million a year profit when all is said and done.

Now I have to say that if you coughed up a half a million a year, you could hire appropriate security to fend off the pirates, or conversely, for probably half that with a decent shady contact you could pay off the pirates to leave you the fuck alone when traveling through their waters.

On the flip side, I just priced a 288′ sailboat similar to the one captured and it cost 180 million dollars. At only 3 million profit a year you’d not finish paying off the boat in your lifetime. But still I think I’d be scheduling my jaunts in pirate waters to closely correspond with passing warships.

Don’t you wish you lived in the lifestyle where you had to be worried about pirates? Man that would be awesome.