abuse for not reading the manual
RTFM! 
Now, seriously...
Vasari is a bit of a tricky start. Are you playing against one AI or more? If you're playing against only one AI and decide to keep pirates enabled, you don't have very many options on how to deal with them. You either have to outbid the AI or you have to eat the wave. If you play against multiple AIs, what I like to do is purposely have a slow start, so the AI looks at you as a pathetic weakling and starts bid wars with other stronger AIs.
Most of my games I play against lots of Unfairs in FFA, and it's very rare that I even have to worry about bidding anything on the first wave (and usually the second).
Second, you don't really need skirmishers along with your space whale. It's pretty capable of doing stuff on its own, and those ships cost a lot of credits early. Especially if you send them along to take a heavier defended planet (with a few LRMs and heavy cruisers) they tend to die because the LRMs love ignoring your capital and firing on them and that's a lot of wasted credits early on.
As a rule of thumb, I only colonize when I can afford to upgrade infrastructure immediately. If you don't, the planet actually costs you income from underdevelopment.
Last thing, don't be afraid of selling resources. Early game especially. Crystal is going to be your main limiter (you need ~80 for labs, ~100 to research ice/volcanic colonization and you only have 1-2 mines, 3 if you're lucky and get an asteroid with 2) so it takes a while. You tend to get quite a big of metal then. Instead of doing quick sell, open the black market window and list them for sale. The AI tends to buy it pretty quickly, and you get lots more $$!
Hope this helps a little 
I usually avoid suggesting this because I think it's less fun, but if pirates are just giving you too much trouble and you want to get a hang of the early start without worrying about them, you can go into Game Options when you're creating a game and disable them.
