France has made contact with pirates who have hijacked a luxury yacht off Somalia and will do everything it can to safeguard the 30-strong crew taken hostage, the French foreign minister said on Sunday.

"We have established contact and it risks being a long drawn out affair," Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told French radio. "Everything must be done to avoid bloodletting."

Asked if France was ready to pay a ransom to secure the release of the crew, he said: "We'll see." Pirates stormed the French-owned yacht, the Ponant, on Friday as it was sailing through the Gulf of Aden, off Puntland towards the Mediterranean. It was due to start a cruise which included Malta.

The pirates took the boat southwards towards the Somali coast and local authorities there said that by Sunday afternoon it was off Garaad, a fishing town in central Somalia. A small French warship is tracking the boat and planes are regularly flying over to film its progress.

"We are following the Ponant from a distance," Defence Minister Herve Morin said. "What we know is that in general (the pirates) like to make land and once ashore they begin to negotiate," he told French television. "There are 30 crew aboard and a priori 10 armed pirates and so we can't do any old thing here," he added. President Nicolas Sarkozy was due to hold an emergency meeting about the hostage crisis later on Sunday, his office said, declining to give further information.

Kidnapping and piracy are lucrative businesses in lawless Somalia and most Somalis treat their captives well in anticipation of a good ransom. The French Defence Ministry said 22 of the crew were French, including six women. The rest were believed to be Ukrainian and Korean. The boat's owner, the Compagnie des Iles du Ponant, told anxious relatives on Sunday they were well.

"The crew has not been ill-treated. They are all together and were able to have breakfast and take showers this morning," the mother of one of the hostages told French radio, relating what company officials had told her. The crew had been sailing without passengers when they were attacked in one of the world's most dangerous stretches of water.

"We do not have the military capacity to combat pirates," Ahmed Said Ow-Nur, ports minister for the semi-autonomous Puntland region, told Reuters by phone.

"They have fast boats, sophisticated weapons and the ransom money from other vessels they seized in the past enabled them to be strong," he added. French media showed navy pictures on Sunday of the pirates sitting on the deck of the Pontant, which was towing the two motorboats they had apparently used to launch their attack.

France has 2,900 troops stationed in Djibouti, which borders Somalia and lies on the coast. It also has a naval force in the Indian Ocean and has diverted at least one warship to the area.

Picture: Pirates stand on an upper deck of the luxury yacht "Ponant" after it was seized off the Somali coast.