April a Record Month for Modern Piracy

This is clearly the two statistics of the day. Global piracy on the rise, via the Independent:

Piracy is enjoying its busiest month since modern records began, official figures show. With three days still to go, there have been 44 attacks on ships around the world - four more than in the whole of March, itself a record-breaking month.

This isn't good either.

Records kept by the International Maritime Bureau, which monitors commercial crime at sea, show that in all there were 102 attacks worldwide in the first three months of 2009, almost twice as many as a year ago.

That is because the folks in other parts of Africa are getting into the action. Check out the live piracy map (click image above for link) to see what I mean. Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, South China Sea, and Malacca Strait continues to be a problem. There are concerns that Somali type piracy could spread to other ungoverned and contested regions globally.

Finally, Somalia...

The seas off Somalia and the Gulf of Aden have become the most dangerous in the world, seeing 61 incidents from January to March, 10 times as many as during the same period in 2008.

April hasn't been a good month for setting 2nd quarter trends. Historically off Somalia, May comes with a lot of wind so we may see number of attacks drop if the weather isn't good, however historically the summer months are supposed to be a monsoon season, and yet piracy went up anyway last year.

Given how the pirates have picked up on modern technology, they are probably watching the weather just like the experts. In the case of piracy in the Strait of Malacca earlier this decade, the massive south east Asian tsunami played a major role in curbing the activity. One thing to watch for is a tsunami that could potentially hit one of these pirate cities and wipe out the boats used for piracy. Weather is a significant factor one should always keep an eye on.