There’s recently been reports that Russian companies are offering trips where you can go and hunt pirates in Somalia. The rumor is that for 7 to 12,000 USD you head out on a boat armed with RPGs and serious machine guns and if you see pirates you can fire at them.
This has been heavily reported by some big bloggers and podcasters. Which raises the question is it true, is it ethical and would you do it?
Table of Contents
Living the Pirate Dream
Somalia has long been shorthand for modern piracy. Images of skinny guys in flip flops boarding container ships with AK 47s became global news in the late 2000s. Insurance rates spiked, private security boomed and naval patrols from NATO, Russia and others flooded the Gulf of Aden. For a while piracy was big business. Then it largely declined, pushed back by coordinated naval action and armed guards on commercial vessels.
Into that mythology steps the idea of the ultimate dark tourism add on. Forget sitting on a beach in Mogadishu. Forget watching war documentaries from your sofa. This is meant to be live action. A kind of Call of Duty meets extreme yachting. You pay your money, climb aboard a heavily armed vessel, cruise into pirate waters and wait. If something suspicious approaches, you squeeze the trigger. A war zone safari.
From a purely marketing perspective, it is genius. It hits all the right notes for the adrenaline crowd. Post Soviet mercenary vibes. Big guns. Lawless seas. The suggestion that you are not just observing history but participating in it. In a world where people pay to dive with sharks or visit nuclear disaster zones, the idea of hunting pirates does not even sound that crazy.
Ethically? That is murkier. Even if piracy is criminal and dangerous, the notion of turning lethal force into a tourism product raises obvious questions. Are you a traveller or a combatant? Who takes responsibility if something goes wrong? And what happens if you shoot at the wrong boat in one of the world’s poorest and most unstable regions? Far too many questions…
Click to read about Socotra.
Now to the awkward bit.
Despite the noise online, there is currently no credible, verifiable evidence that a legitimate Russian company is openly selling pirate hunting tours to tourists for 7 to 12,000 USD. No clear company name. No confirmed departures. No independent reporting beyond recycled claims and social media chatter. Similar stories have circulated before over the years and often turn out to be exaggerated, satirical or based on a single dubious source.
Could private security contractors operate in the region? Yes. Could wealthy individuals charter armed vessels? Possibly. But as a mainstream bookable adventure tour, the evidence just is not there.
For now it sits in that grey zone between dark fantasy and internet myth. Great headline. Questionable reality. And until someone produces something more solid than a podcast anecdote, it remains just that.
Would YPT offer this?
While we consider ourselves well and truly out there, everyone has there line, so when it comes to hunting pirates, hitting cows with an AK47, visiting the Semen Tribe of PNG and well anything related to selling god to the Sentinalese were largely out.
We can though offer tours to both Somalia and Somliland, because we are not complete wimps.
About Post Author
