Cruises along the African coast?

Factual Questions
1

Recently there were a bunch of news stories about pirates attacking a cruise ship off the Somali coast. My reaction: “They have cruises off the Somali coast??”

Anyone know anything about this? What you see, where you sail from – that kind of thing.

2

I don’t think they are necessarily cruises along the African coast. Instead, they are re-positioning cruises to get vessels from the Mediterranean to south or southeast Asia. In order to move the ship between these areas, they need to traverse the Red Sea and hence pass by the coast of Somali.

That cruise ship that recently got attacked off Somali was en route to Mombasa, Kenya. I imagine a few cruise ships call in there as well as Zanzibar. After the attack, the ship re-routed to the Seychelles.

3

Actually, it had passengers and it was a paid cruise.

*Natansohn said efforts were under way Saturday to locate the pirates. “We have notified U.S., Canadian and Australian authorities because most of our passengers come from those three countries, as well as local authorities in Africa.”

“Seabourn ‘Spirit’ has offered itineraries in that part of the world before, but we’ll obviously be looking at the incident to determine what to do in the future,” she said.*

*A pirate attack on a ship full of Western holidaymakers has jolted East Africa’s bomb-scarred tourist industry and reminded the world of the threat posed by Somalia, an anarchic state awash with weapons.

Woken by machinegun fire and a rocket-propelled grenade crashing into their cruise ship at dawn on Saturday, the tourists gazed in disbelief as attackers in two small boats tried, but eventually failed, to seize their vessel.*

4

They still take passengers for repositioning cruises. Sometimes you can catch a deal on a one-day cruise from San Francisco to Los Angeles when they have to move boats around.

5

Yes, I know that. I didn’t say they were just moving the ship, but that it was a repositioning cruise. This is a cruise, with paying passengers, that the company runs between two regular cruising areas that may be used in different seasons. Some companies, for example, do trans-Atlantic cruises when they are moving ships between the Caribbean and Europe seasonally.

6

Here’s a selection of repositioning cruises offered by various companies.

7

Looks like they were repositing the ship from Kenya (neighbor to Somalia) for a couple of cruises out of Singapore. Here is a link of the itinerary:

http://res.destinationoceans.com/travel/cruise/sailplan.rvlx?CruiseItineraryID=31551

8

I meant repositioning the ship. Gee, wish I had edit capability.

9

Here is a better itinerary:

http://res.destinationoceans.com/travel/cruise/sailplan.rvlx?CruiseItineraryID=31517

10

Thanks all. It seems that the answer to “what do you see?” is “the boat”, for long periods of time. The only place on mainland Africa that they stop at, other than Egypt, is Kenya.

11

Thanks. As the itinerary shows, they were basically repositioning the ship from the eastern Mediterranean to Singapore, with a two-day stopover in Mombasa, Kenya. That route would have put them off the coast of Somalia for about 4 to 5 days.

12

Looks like the cruise ship was not entirely unprepared for pirates:

Cruise ship attacked by pirates used sonic weapon