Suspected Somali pirates presented before the Mombasa chief magistrate on Wednesday. (AP)

Mombasa, Kenya, Nov. 20 (Reuters): The water was still, the sky cloudless and the 12-man crew, Kenyans and Sri Lankans, were relaxed after their Sunday morning cup of tea in February last year as they returned from taking food aid to north Somalia.

Then they spotted a speck on the horizon and saw it get bigger. Suddenly realising that a boat was heading right at them, they changed course and put the throttle down.

After an hour-long chase, the pirates’ “mother ship” dropped two fibreglass speedboats, which raced up alongside. Each held half a dozen young Somalis armed with pistols, machineguns and rocket-launchers.

The terrified sailors rushed to the bridge and held their hands high in surrender as the pirates hooked a metal ladder on the side and boarded, firing one warning shot.

“They said, ‘don’t be frightened, you are just poor people like us, we won’t kill anyone unless you disobey us’,” recounted Kenyan mariner James Sambi, who asked for a false name to be used in case of repercussions with employers.

And so, in a case typical of a long-running phenomenon only now gaining world attention, began a 42-day saga that ended when the owner of the UN-contracted ship paid a hefty ransom.

Pirates have been preying on boats in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean ever since Somalia descended into anarchy in 1991. But the rate and scale of attacks has increased dramatically this year. Eighteen Indian sailors were freed on Sunday after two months in captivity amid talk that $1 million to $2.5 million was paid in ransom.

On Tuesday, the Indian Navy scored the first big success by a foreign patrol vessel when its INS Tabar destroyed a pirate “mother ship”.

Lost behind the headlines are the tales of seamen, most from developing countries and some earning as little as $100 (Rs 5,000) a month, caught up in the hijackings.

Kenyan sailors painted a picture of initially loud, gun-wielding, threatening pirates, who very quickly treated their captives with relative decency.

The hijackers of Sambi’s ship even brought a live goat on board the first day, slaughtering it and sharing the meat. On the second day, they allowed each sailor to send a text message from a satellite telephone to loved ones. “We are captured but I am ok. I will be back,” was Sambi’s message to his parents.

Somali pirates have killed few, if any, hostages, and have generally kept them properly fed, usually on goat meat. But they regularly rob their captives. There have been occasional reports of beatings, but the main problem for the hostages appears to have been uncertainty, the long wait, lack of communication with home, and fear of being shot in a rescue operation.

Prabhat Goyal, the captain of the ship hijacked in September with 18 Indian crew, spoke to his family only once during the two-month captivity.