Hmm... Did we get to Aarlong and saving Nami's dumb ass yet, or does that come after the baratie?

Arlong park is the arc coming up next after the guest comics (presumably).

What Kinrah said. Trust me, Arlong Park is NOT a small arc.

I'm early enough to declare storytime for once eh? Let's make it a good one... Tell a story about dealing with Pirates. Not necessarily friendly ones like the straw hat crew.

Odd... pirates really haven't fared well in the campaigns I've been a part of except for space pirates and those were the PCs. XD

We had one game intentionally patterned after the original Final Fantasy (and it was the only Dungeons & Dragons campaign in which I participated). So while we sailed and would regularly encounter FFish pirates I can't remember if anything cool happened when we had the big, official encounter patterned after the one in the game but I do remember that our party had enough going for it that regular pirates didn't remain a threat for long.

Helps that we had actual D&D character classes so unlike an actual white mage, my cleric had access to a wider variety of spells... including Lightning based ones (our GM was very indulgent).

Not my story, but I'll copy/paste something from the Tale of Grendel for you.

Anyway, on the travel to Solomon, we get accosted by pirates shortly after exiting the warp (GM randomly rolls each time). They get past the batteries and dock with our transport, and send in a boarding party, and since they docked in the hallway outside our rooms (we got BAD rooms for the trip) we are the first thing they run into. Thankfully, the blaring sirens and sounds of shouting invaders did wake us, and we had time enough to set up cover and make the hallway something of a deathtrap, and after killing sixteen pirates who tried to rush us, the rest are bunkered down, and we have ourselves a stalemate. After a few rounds pass with only an occasional trade of potshots, Grendel (who had not hit a single pirate with his stub revolver) has an idea. He confers with our new Cleric Nihilius (who had taken the Firebrand redemptionist background) for a bit, and then after fiddling a bit, walks out into the open (he was made to take a fear test to walk down bullet avenue, but failed by less than a degree, so after spending a bit of time whimpering, he went).
The pirates, seeing this, get ready to turn him into a pile of bullets, before a few of them pass an awareness check to notice Grendel had strapped twelve flamer fuel canisters to his chest, and was holding a firebomb in one hand and a molotov (quick and dirty conversion of rotgut using a piece of cloth) in the other with a lit Iho stick in his mouth. The pirates who passed the check proceed to frantically prevent their less observant compatriots from opening fire. So Grendel walks until he is pretty much right in the faces of the pirates, and proceeds to try and threaten to blow himself up and kill all of them if they don't get off the ship. GM makes Grendel roll an intimidate check(he is unskilled in intimidate). He rolled a 99. GM rules he stands there stuttering and gibbering for a moment, at which point Grendel spends a Fate Point to re-roll. He rolls a 1. The pirates flee for their lives, leaving behind their fallen comrades.
Grendel, before the campaign even truly began, pulled a Gran Torino-esque crazy old man moment, and made pirates run away from one fat guy.
...
The rest of the trip passes without incident.
...
(a few chapters later)
She looks as if she wishes to say more, but our ship shudders and jerks, as we return to real space. She get ready to resume speaking, but the ship begins to shudder again, for an entirely different reason: We are under fire.
Apparently we dropped right out of the warp next to space pirates, as soon the familiar sound of connectors breaching our ship could be heard echoing about. Inez starts bellowing orders as the drugged commissar exits our rooms, and when some now roaming pirates round the corner, he grabs one in each cybernetic arm, and starts slowly crushing their faces as they scream and plead, all the while looking at them with a face of hate and drug-induced mania. The rest of the party groups up with Grendel and Benedicta, and after sparing a glance to see they really didn’t want to bother the commissar right now, headed down the corridors, hoping to find the main group of pirates. Sure enough, a few corners turned and there they are, shouting and shooting as they pour in from a massive breach caused by their ship. We quickly hide behind cover, and are trying to lay down enough fire they pay attention to us without hitting them so hard they scatter throughout the ship in search of weaker prey. One of the times Grendel pops up his head to take a pot shot, He says he wants to do an awareness test to see if he can observe anything useful about the marauding pirates. He rolls and 11, four degrees of success, and the GM rolls on a table of his own (I asked him later, he actually made a D100 table of different ships of pirates, and had been using it since our first campaign months ago)
The GM rolls, consults the table, does a double take and starts laughing from the gut. Interested, we demand to know what he finds so funny, to which he responds, ‘They are the same group of pirates Grendel scared off on the trip to Solomon!’
We all start laughing, when Grendel announces he is going to grab some Flamer canisters, firebombs and a bottle of rotgut, and do a repeat performance. We start to mock him, then realize that it actually makes sense, as those pirates should sure as hell recognize this guy. We quickly rig him up, and then once again he heads out, smoking a Iho-stick and holding a firebomb and a Molotov with a dozen flamer canisters clearly strapped to his chest. Once again the GM rolls awareness for the pirates, once again the ones that pass stop their compatriots from shooting this man, and once again the pirates are faced with what appears to be a suicidal and scary as hell fat guy. At the same time, while they are staring in Grendel’s face, several pirates run screaming back into the main area, followed by Inez’s commissar, his face twisted into a snarl with bloodshot eyes and a foaming mouth, covered in blood and carrying two severely mutilated pirates (they were an entirely new set of pirates, not the ones he had grabbed before).
At this, the pirates decide fuck it, the Emperor hates them, and decide to flee. As they do so, the guardsmen both start lobbing hallucinogen grenades and fire grenades after them, and right as they start to disengage the tech-priest fires off an electrical burst at them for good measure. So their ship detaches, its crew burning and hallucinating and scared out of their minds, all while their ship malfunctions. Our ship takes potshots until they go boom. So we are once again greeted and thanked by the Captain, crew and passengers, when a shipman runs up to the captain, blurting that their sensors detected an Eldar ship heading towards Cantos before them.
And it was here we ran out of time. So next session, we will have to deal with a planet with two sets of traitor legions, potential orkish remnants and now apparently Eldar, and we will have to do it all before three weeks have passed, and do it without official backup. AWESOME.

I recall a session in which one player - running a ninja dragon, and having just learned a bit of item-based magic - duelled a pirate for the right to not be eviscerated on sight.
He didn't NEED this, you understand; ninja are notorious for going unnoticed. But he took the offer. I think he just wanted to show off.
The duel culminated in a magical battle between fifty-foot flaming dragons made of darkness, opposed by the local spell equivalent of orbital lasers.
Dragon ninja won, of course. Even pirate wizards can't handle ninja when there's only one ninja.

Had just joined a new group that was playing fourth edition and was starting a new adventure. Quest opens up with us chasing after the pirates that sacked the fishing village we called home. We chased them back to their late and then proceeded to wreck them as the DM hadn't realized that my Dragonborn fighter had 25 armor at lvl 1, with no shield and was shrugging off pretty much every attack. We finally make it to the end of the lair and discover the leader about to start sacrificing the captured villagers, family members of the rest of the party, to Tiamat. His bodyguards get in the way, and he ends up sacrificing all the villagers and becomes an avatar of Tiamat. Three freaking hours later we finally kill the guy and are allowed to loot the place. We steal their ship, and that ended session one.

Session two started with us ransacking the boat and learning via the captains journal that his pirates had been fired by a cult of some kind to raid a village and perform that specific ritual. The journal mentions that he was to meet someone from the cult on a specific day in a specific city to report what happened and get the rest of his pay. We were supposed to spend the session going overland to the city so that he could introduce another faction. Instead, we stealthed our ship up a nearby river and derailed the plot so badly the DM ripped up all his notes and called it and session.