Captain Prabhat Goyal with wife Seema in New Delhi on Tuesday. (AFP)

New Delhi, Nov. 25: The pirates had Kalashnikovs, Prabhat Goyal only a screwdriver. But the captain of the hijacked Stolt Valor says he fought back, guerrilla-style.

Goyal today described how he had kept his head when the Somali hijackers fired all around him to frighten him. And he had kept his sense of humour as he took his own small revenge.

“I used to go out every night with a screwdriver and disable their water supply,” Goyal, who returned to India this morning with six of his men, told reporters.

“They were dependent on us for supplies, even for tea. We loaned them glasses, which were brought back by my men once they were done. We didn’t give them an inch. But they kept us at gunpoint all the time; they would take their weapons along even to the toilet.”

The 30-odd captors had tried to break the will of the 22 crew members, all crammed in the ship’s bridge with little food and water for 64 days.

“One day, after they realised the negotiations were not getting anywhere, they picked seven of us. We were taken to the deck. There they separated three of us and tried to force me to abandon the vessel,” Goyal told reporters, detailing an incident a crew member had recounted yesterday.

“I was told to get off…. The hijackers fired from their Kalashnikovs all around me to force me to jump but I stayed put. The ordeal lasted two-and-a-half hours. All this while the crew were crying as they felt that if the captain was killed, that would mean the end.”

All the 18 Indians aboard the ship have now reached home. After Goyal’s flight from Muscat landed at Delhi airport around 3.45am, daughter Ayushi, 11, ran to greet him in the lounge.

Goyal, who said the ordeal was “unimaginable by any human account”, wants to go back to the sea but his son Shivansh, 7, who suffers from a hearing impairment and needs constant attention, has other ideas.

“He told me he would tell papa to stay at home, always,” Goyal’s wife Seema said. “He told me, ‘Unse keh dena ki ab kahin nahi jaana, bas hamare saath hi rehna (tell him never to go away again but stay with us)’.”

Seema and daughters Trishi, 16, and Ayushi too would be happy to see Goyal take up a shore job. But the wife added: “I have been married to a seafarer for 20 years and I know what it means to be a sailor. I won’t stop him from pursuing his career. But I can understand what the kids are feeling, they have missed their father a lot.”

For now, the family will be celebrating a late Diwali at home in Dehra Dun. Would the captain then take his wife on a holiday?

“Is that something you should know? Let me keep that between my wife and myself,” Goyal twinkled.