But despite the monsoons, international naval patrols off the Somali coast get a lot of the credit.

“The role of the navies have been critical in bringing these attacks down because they can do things which neither private armed security nor the ship owners can do, which is to go after the mother ships and board them; remove their weapons; remove their equipment before they get into a position where they pose a threat to merchant ships. There’s also been one incident where the navies took action against a logistics base off the pirates’ shore in Somalia on the beach,” he said.

Also, more cargo vessels and oil tankers now have contingents of private armed security guards.

Mukundan said on the other side of Africa, the Gulf of Guinea is a pirate hot spot.

“Attacks in the Gulf of Guinea have increased, and what is very worrying is that they have seemed to have gone well and truly transnational. What last year was purely a Nigerian problem appears now to have spread to the neighboring countries of Benin and Togo; and since the end of September there has been an attack in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast where a tanker was hijacked. So this is a very worrying trend,” he said.

Right now, the Nigerian navy has borne the bulk of anti-piracy measures in the Gulf of Guinea.

The International Maritime bureau reported in Asia there were 51 pirate attacks in the first nine months of the year. But Mukundan said those incidents cannot compare to attacks off the African coasts, which are often very violent.