San Francisco Bay Is Being Taken Over By "Real-Life" Pirates
NY Post - Houseboat and yacht residents in the San Francisco Bay have sounded off about incidents of piracy skyrocketing by marauders pillaging and plundering from their watercrafts — and even stealing entire boats.
I don't want to make light out of a bad situation. When you boil down what's been happening in San Francisco Bay, it's nothing more than people being robbed by criminals. Very uncool behavior. I would never write a blog about land base criminal wreaking havoc on footed pedestrians. Unless they were doing it in like, a really funny way. For example, if a string people were robbed at gunpoint in their backyards and the criminal consistently got away in a hot air balloon, I would blog about that. I might even take the side of the Hot Air Balloon Bandit. That's pretty awesome.
Pirates are only a little funny. A story titled, "Pirates wreak havoc on San Francisco Bay" isn't close to as high on the funny scale as a Hot Air Balloon Bandit. But even though the first paragraph of the article uses the phrase 'pillaging and plundering', I'd imagine most people don't find that funny at all. Looking at an individual case of a man who makes an honest living as a fisherman having his personal fish stolen by an asshole with a boat and a gun is not a laughing matter. However, the idea of a nameless, faceless Silicon Valley billionaire on his new yacht having his bitcoin hard drive stolen by a swashbuckling matey on the high seas in 2023.. that I would have to blog about. But that's not what pirates are anymore. Unfortuantely, the tales of modern day San Franciscan pirates, fall into the category of "sad and happening to good people."
“Multiple vessels have been stolen and ransacked. Victims have had to resort to personally confronting the criminals to recover their property without the benefit of police support. Is this appropriate activity for a 79-year-old senior?”
One resident told the outlet she kayaked over to assist a man who was calling for help Tuesday night.
“They’re yelling, ‘Help me, please, please. Anybody help me.’ And I go out there in my kayak with a headlamp, and there is a sailboat drifting down the estuary, and with my kayak I towed it to shore,” said the woman, who did not reveal her name because she was afraid of retaliation.
The sailor in need was a “panicked and terrified young man” who said pirates had cut his line during a confrontation.
Unequivocally not funny. It's more fucked up than anything. The one suspected picture of alleged pirates show them riding in a small motor boat. Honestly, to call them pirates is disrespectful to real pirating. Real pirates ride around on big wooden ships with skull & crossbones sails flying at full mast. Their captains have wisecracking pet parrots. They're more than just a couple douche bags with guns. Modern day pirates are such losers. Classic pirates used to do cool things like shoot cannons, make people walk the plank, and have sex with manatees because they had been at sea so long that they forgot what women look like. Pirates used to be charming. They laughed a lot. They sang songs. The only people they had beef with were other pirates who were looking for the same treasure as them. I suppose they would stop to loot and pillage the occasion town, which isn't that cool. But they only did that because they were drunk.
Nowadays pirates have that whole Captain Phillips vibe. There is zero charm to a Captain Phillips pirate. They don't sing any songs. I don't even think they're drunk. They just take over cargo ships and steal whatever dumb shit Tom Hanks is transporting. Or in this case, steal small safety boats from the Alameda Community Sailing Center.
The troubling piracy trend had struck the Alameda Community Sailing Center, where four of their safety boats, which are worth between $25,000 and $35,000 each, had been stolen or destroyed, Fox Business reported Saturday.
“We cannot run our program without these boats,” owner Kame Richards reportedly wrote in a letter to the municipal commission.
We should really stop calling these guys pirates. If I were these people, and I saw a NY Post article that said "Pirates wreak havoc on San Francisco bay", I would feel like a bad ass. I'd be like, "hell yeah I've made it. I'm a pirate. Just like I've wanted to be since I was 6." We shouldn't be propping them up like that. We should call them something like water rats. Every time I see a headline that says pirates, my mind instinctively goes, "Oh sweet like Jack Sparrow". But that's not the case at all. We need a distinction between these criminals on row boats, and real-life, honorable, high seas sailing pirates.
As a matter of fact, since the victims of these pirates are having such a hard time getting help from the police, maybe we need to go find some real pirates to take care of the water rat problem. The ocean is understandably hard to patrol. It's vast and never ending. And who knows how to patrol them better than a few drunk ass beard having ass buccaneers. Kick them some gold and tell them that these water rats are out here claiming to be pirates. I bet the real pirates won't take kindly to them soiling their good name. We'll have our water rat problem taken care of in no time.