Ah, the early years are the best.
Sometimes no escorts, sometimes just a token escort that is easily dealt with if you can sneak up on the herd after dark.
I hit a convoy out of Freetown once that was chock full of big cargo ships and ore carriers with one sad lonely Black Swan leading the pack. There were a couple of what must have been fairly slow armed merchies or maybe a trawler or something that tried to fire on me when I first surfaced... so I just parked on the opposite of the convoy and they had to fire over their own ships to try and hit me. I think they actually helped me sink a couple.
