Unrep

Unrep

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Somali Pirates: Texas Firm Buys Anti-Pirate Fleet

Reported here:
Espada Logistics and Security Group has purchased its own fleet of vessels to provide security services for the commercial shipping industry in the Gulf of Aden.Until recently, Espada had been leasing the vessels it was using to guard the merchant ships sailing in the pirate-infested waters off the coasts of Yemen and Somalia. But the increasing demands on the Yemini Coast Guard and Navy made that arrangement more difficult to manage, says Jim Jorrie, president of San Antonio-based Espada.

“We needed our own equipment on our own schedule to handle the growing demands for our services,” Jorrie says. “So we made the decision last year to purchase our own vessels.”

Espada, which is based in San Antonio, currently owns a fleet of five vessels, all about 75-feet in length and outfitted with additional fuel capacity, giving them a roughly 2,200 nautical mile range. Each ship can carry a crew of six to eight people.

“The boats look a lot like the PT-109 that John F. Kennedy made famous,” Jorrie says. “We did a lot of work to get them last year, and now they are in the shop having a lot of technical maintenance done. They should be out of the yard and available in a couple of weeks.”
I don't know about PT-109 but the photo above comes from one of Espada's brochures.



Espada's website can be found here.

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