This is the Royal Navy’s 31,000 tonne tanker, RFA Wave Knight. She is almost 200 metres long with a beam of over 28 metres.

She has a crew of up to 100 - 72 Royal Fleet Auxiliary personnel with provision for another 26 Royal Navy personnel for helicopter and weapons systems operations.

She has two 30 mm cannon and four 7.62 mm machine guns.

This 615ft armed ship sat within 50ft of the 38ft yacht Lynn Rival and simply watched as Paul and Rachel Chandler were taken hostage, hijacked by 2 small fast skiffs with 13 pirates on board.

Wave Knight was afraid that any intervention might cause injury to the captives.

An anonymous member of the crew was so disgusted at this that the information on Wave Knight’s inaction was leaked to the media.

And we talk about a Ministry of Defence.

The image of RFA Wave Knight above is cropped from a photograph by copyright holder Dmgerrard and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.