A "wild nightmare" is how the Greek master of a VLCC described his seven-week hijack ordeal at the hands of gun-toting Somali pirates.
But the captain of the 300,300-dwt Maran Centaurus (built 1995) has not been put off from a life at sea and vowed to once again sail the waters off the war-torn East African country.
Theodoros Economopoulos says that up to 40 heavily armed pirates threatened him and his 27 crew members "like animals" following their seizure in the Somali Basin on 29 November.
"It is a nightmare I will try to forget. It was the same game every day.
They were threatening people, even to take a T-shirt," the Greek master told TradeWinds via satellite telephone from the tanker's bridge this week.
Complicating matters was the fact that none of the captors could speak English, forcing them to communicate with the crew with the barrel of a gun.
"Some of them were very quiet but the others, I have no words to explain; all day they are going around shouting. But if someone puts a gun to you and tells you to take off your T-shirt, you understand what he means." He termed the period until its release on 18 January as "wild: W-I-L-D".
When quizzed on the reported ransom of as high as $9m, the master said he had not seen the drop and had no knowledge of the amount handed over.
It has widely been reported that the pirates received between $5.5m and $7m on board with up to $2m rumoured to have been deposited into a bank account.
After the ship was freed, the pirates claimed to have given the crew $500,000 as reward for their alleged good co-operation during the ordeal, something Economopoulos flatly denies.
"Not only did they not give us anything, they took everything we had. They took even our clothes. They took whatever they found and was interesting to
them: clothes, shoes, CDs, laptops, DVD players. Even at the last moment, they were ransacking our cabins, taking whatever they could." Despite the nightmare ordeal, Economopoulos says he has no intention of avoiding the waters off Somalia in the future.
"I'm not going to change my life because something happened to me; it is my profession. It was a bad case but life goes on for all of us. We have to think about tomorrow."