PLYMOUTH, England - Commander Peter Sparkes knows what he's up against.
"Modern day piracy is very much not Johnny Depp and Pirates of the Caribbean," he tells us from the bridge of the HMS Cumberland.

"They are generally Somalis operating in Skiff-like launches armed with AK-47's and rocket propelled grenades."

On the day we join them, Commander Sparkes and his crew are being put through their paces by the training arm of Britain's Royal Navy. Currently in waters off the Navy's base in Plymouth, southwest England, in a few weeks time the Cumberland will sail for the Gulf.
There, the ship will join up with a multinational coalition charged with maritime security operations.

That's shorthand for a wide range of tasks including counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, combating human trafficking and piracy. All that in an area some two-and-a-half-million square miles in size.

Piracy incidents off the coast of Somalia are on the increase. Many go unreported but one that did make the headlines was in April this year. That's when a group of 30 people were seized aboard a luxury yacht after gunmen overran their boat. They were freed only when French commandos stormed the yacht.

The pirates were shipped back to France for trial.
According to John Burnett, a leading authority on modern piracy, the situation is dangerously out of control. "The pay-offs are tremendous," he says, "we're talking two million dollars."

And where once it was the ship or the cargo the pirates were after, now it's the crew: Worth a King's ransom, as Burnett puts it.

Storming a suspect vessel in the manner of the French commandos is not in the mandate of HMS Cumberland.  Operations like that require approval much higher up the chain of command. But they need to be prepared to do it. And on the day we joined them, that's just what they were training for.

About half an hour after we put to sea, the ship's crew spots a suspicious vessel. In reality, it's a local boat owner who's agreed to take part in the exercise. But as far as the Cumberland is concerned it's a dhow in the Gulf of Oman. And they're unhappy with what they've heard after making contact.

Commander Sparkes gives the order to board.
Minutes later we are speeding off to the dhow on two smalls ribs with about a dozen men from the ship. After securing the area around the dhow we board. The crew are interrogated, the boat is searched. There could be drugs on board, or an illegal weapons consignment.

In the event, the search turns up nothing untoward, but then this is just day one of the training. Later exercises will see the crew face an armed response on the dhow and they'll be forced to deal with it.
"We'll have to respond to a range of threats," says Commander Sparkes, looking forward to deployment into theatre later in the year, "and we're ready to do so."

As they like to say on board HMS Cumberland: Train hard, fight easy.

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