I didn’t know that pirate attacks still exist until my friend was kidnapped by pirates.

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Today’s dispatch ✈︎ arrives at:

15:00 Istanbul | 13:00 London | 08:00 New York | 22:00 Sydney

One of the strangest things shipping taught me is that pirate attacks are not just something Johnny Depp experiences while dramatically walking across sinking ships with eyeliner. They are real. I mean… disturbingly real. And what makes this even stranger is that most people working outside the maritime industry have absolutely no idea.

Before entering shipping myself, I genuinely thought piracy belonged somewhere between history books and films. In my mind, pirates existed alongside treasure maps, talking parrots, and men named Captain Something. The closest thing modern piracy had to reality for me was probably the movie Captain Phillips, which I watched thinking year ago - well, surely this is an exceptionally dramatic situation that almost never happens.

Apparently I was wrong.

Because modern shipping casually operates in a world where vessels cross “high-risk areas,” crews receive anti-piracy training, razor wire gets installed onboard, armed guards board ships while passing risky areas, and everyone discusses this through extremely calm e-mails written in size-11 Arial font (I use Times New Roman).

Until a pirate boat approaches a giant vessel.

I will take you travel in time a little bit.

• Fifteen seafarers of Turkish nationality, who were kidnapped back in January from their containership MV Mozart in the Gulf of Guinea, have been rescued, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed.