Hijacking a cruise ship

It was a failed attempt but some of those Somali pirates tried to hijack a cruise ship. The part I thought was funny was this quote from one of the passengers.

"We didn't think they would be cheeky enough to attack a cruise ship," Wendy Armitage, of Wellington, New Zealand, told The Associated Press shortly after disembarking the ship for a daylong port stop in the Omani capital of Muscat.

1985, the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship, was hijacked.

1996, the Avrazya, a passenger ferry on the Black Sea was hijacked.

So maybe some passenger vessel is hijacked about every 10 years or so? I'd think that if you're going through pirate infested waters on a cruise ship these days I'd take a quick break for a little thought about the possibilities.

A cute little tidbit of the history of the Achille Lauro is:

The ship continued in service; she was reflagged in 1987 when the Lauro Line became StarLauro. On November 30, 1994, she caught fire off the coast of Somalia. Abandoned, the vessel sank