Here is a list as of today. Check back at the linked site for further updates.

Sorry about that, guys.

Initially, no one noticed the ship was being attacked. The first warning came when a woman intuitively leaned over the railing in semidarkness and noticed something when she peered down. She suddenly turned to her fellow passengers and said: “Yikes, there’s a small boat next to us!”

Tayler and the others rushed to the railing and also saw what he described as five or six men sitting in a roofless pirate boat. One started climbing a rope to the deck beneath them. “He was already halfway up,” says Tayler. One passenger screamed: “Pirates!”

Without hesitation, passengers began to grab whatever they could find around them. “We immediately began throwing tables and deck chairs at the rope,” said Tayler. One hit a pirate scaling it. He fell off and the boat turned around, Tayler recalls.

The skirmish between the passengers and the pirates lasted for several minutes, he says. Suddenly, the pirates opened fire — Tayler says he counted three salvos of 25 to 30 rounds each.

Again and again, the pirate boat would approach the ship and disappear under the stern, only to reemerge. Tayler and his fellow passengers continued to throw chairs despite the gunfire. One passenger was shot in the leg and one bullet grazed the head of a crew member. The armed security staff finally turned up six to eight minutes into the skirmish, passengers claim.

Kudos to the cruise line for having armed security on board, even if valuable time was wasted because their weapons had to be kept in a safe. And major congratulations to the brave passengers and their quick thinking!

Cruise deals on offer at the moment include offers of free airfare, unlimited shore excursions and up to $1,000 onboard credit for every cabin. All that is on top of the already slashed prices of 50% off and more. There is really sort of a perfect storm at the moment where the economy is bad, so that people are hesitant to splash out on vacation spending plus the cruise lines have built so many ships in recent years that they have thousands of cabins they need to fill.

There are some static costs for a ship and they remain the same no matter how many passengers are on board. Just off the top of my head, fuel, port charges and staff need to be paid for. Hence the bottom line for us cruisers is that the cruise lines are super-motivated to get bodies on board.

So get out there and ferret out some incredible cruise deals — it won’t be hard at all!

And good for them because they really enhance the cruising experience. Here is an interview with a man who sails over 200 days a year for free.

I’ve got to become an expert at something so that I can spend my retirement like that!

You should really check them out and sign up for their email newsletter. I’ve been receiving their newsletter for years and can vouch that they do NOT spam you with crap and they offer a revolving selection of very good deals on cruises. About every two weeks they send out a new letter listing deals they have negotiated.

Silversea is a luxury cruise line and they offered a half-price deal through Vacations to Go for two days only, which I snapped up like a hungry Tassie Devil! Yummy!