hijacked the mers k alabama. reporter: the next day they were there again, was there anything you think you could have done to keep them off the ship in the first place? we pretty much did the industry standard for that time, what was the norm for pirate prevention of the and it turned out that it wasn t enough. reporter: what was that moment like? what feeling went through you when you said, i ve got a pirate on board my boat the first time in more than 100 years that a pirate had ever set foot on a u.s. vessel. it was a sense of a slippery slope and what opportunities we had then to change it. it was the first realization that they had gotten aboard the boat and the game had changed. it had turned into a cat and mouse game on the ship and hide and seek game and they were winning, at that instance they were winning. reporter: you ended up in the