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 Kisingitini is a small Muslim village on the north shore of Pate Island and is the unlikely centre for dhow building in Kenya. The foreshore is lined with boatyards constructing dhows for the country’s fishing industry, which is still based on sail and line fishing. In the wetter southerly monsoon, they subsistence farm goats, coconuts, maize, beans and bananas. During Sailkenya’s first trip, we returned Ashraf, our 10 metre dhow, to her birthplace.
In the calmer northerly monsoon, they fish 12 miles out into the Indian Ocean, but in this dry season they have to rely on stored fresh water, which is caught by concrete aprons during the wet season. They have one radio mast for communication with Lamu and the local hospital and a daily motorised dhow is their only contact with the mainland.
Shallo Issa, Sailkenya’s local partner, was born in Kisingitini and gave us a tour of the dhow building yards. The building process starts with laying the keel.
A long straight length of neem or camphor is shaped by adze for the keel and then stem and stern posts added.
The new government has a moratorium on logging at the moment because so many trees were lost when Moi handed out licences to his cronies, so that much wood now has to be imported.
The garboard planks are then notched into the top of the keel before grown timbers are fixed as ribs.
The planks are soaked in shark oil and heated by an open fire to bend them into shape.
A bow drill makes holes for the nails to attach the planks. Screws are expensive and the quality has historically been poor.
Dhow planking used to be fixed with coir rope, but the advent of iron nails allowed the design to change to transom sterns copied from European boats.
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