As far as Nancy Erley is concerned, the best way to deal with pirates is to avoid them in the first place.

Speaking at the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend Saturday, the Seattle-based sailing teacher and circumnavigator said cruisers embarking on long-distance voyages should get informed about the world’s hot spots for piracy and avoid them.

On the first of her two worldwide journeys, from 1989 to 1994, Erley sailed on the Red Sea, one of the most notorious places worldwide for pirates. Now, she said, she wouldn’t think about going there.

“At the present time, I don’t think anybody should be going up the Red Sea in a cruising boat,” said Erley, who teaches sailing to women on her 38-foot cutter-rigged sloop, Tethys. “Avoidance is the best tactic for piracy.”

New problem areas for piracy crop up frequently, Erley said. She recommended cruisers look online for current information on piracy hot spots and mentioned the website www.noonsite.com, started by author and world cruiser Jimmy Cornell, as a good resource.

Though pirate attacks are on the rise, Erley said cruisers may have a better chance of surviving one than in the past. While a typical pirate attack previously might have involved killing a boat’s crew and taking the vessel, Erley said pirates have turned to a more lucrative approach.

“They realize your life is the most valuable thing, so they want to ransom you for bigger bucks,” she said.

The most highly publicized pirate attacks are against commercial ships on the high seas, but Erley said piracy involving cruisers usually occurs close to shore and is committed by land-based thieves who see dollar signs in the form of an easily accessible boat.

That was the case in August 2008, when robbers armed with machetes and an ice pick swam out to Alaska couple Daniel and Nancy Dryden’s sailboat while it was moored outside of a marina in Rio Dulce, a popular cruising area in Guatemala. Demanding U.S. dollars, the robbers attacked the couple, killing Daniel Dryden, 66, and seriously injuring his 67-year-old wife.

Online maps and resources can show sailors the piracy hotspots to avoid.

While many long-distance cruisers rightly worry about pirates, Erley cautioned against assuming that an attack is imminent when a boat approaches in foreign waters. More often than not, she said, the other boat is looking for help or has another innocuous purpose in mind. In Sri Lanka, Erley said, superstitious fishermen having an unsuccessful day at sea will pull up alongside another boat to “rub their bad luck off” on the other boat.

Erley recalled the time a boat approached Tethys off the coast of Ecuador, carrying a group of gap-toothed, sinewy men armed with knives. After a few terrified minutes of struggling to understand the men’s Spanish, a member of Erley’s crew realized they were simply asking if the women could look at their GPS and give them their position.

“I tell you, our adrenaline was running before we got this thing figured out,” she said.

Cruisers should take care not to escalate a potential attack, Erley said. She recommended against carrying firearms, which are prohibited in most countries and could land cruisers in jail. Pepper spray is problematic, since a puff of wind can easily blow it back at a sailor, Erley said, and a flare gun thrown into an approaching boat poses the same risk.

Instead, Erley recommended cruisers take precautions such as traveling in convoys, installing alarms and deck lights that can be activated from the owner’s stateroom and arranging to check in with other cruisers by radio at prearranged times.

Copies should be made of important documents, dinghies stored on deck should be locked with a chain and valuables should be hidden—for example, in a ziploc bag stashed in the bilge. Erley also recommended that cruisers sailing in the tropics, where hot temperatures preclude closing companionways at night, use a slatted hatchboard that locks from the inside, allowing air in while keeping intruders out.

Sometimes, Erley said, cruisers can throw pirates off-guard through a gesture of kindness—offering food or water, for example—or by keeping up a conversation.

“If you can engage the people who come on your boat in some human way and give them what they want, they may not hurt you,” she said. “If you start with your fists up, whoever’s got the bigger fists is going to win.”