The end of the day

Even before we saw the large dhows in Lamu, we really enjoyed watching the smaller dhows that fished on the reef outside our house. All of these dhows are handmade either by digging out a mango tree or built from wood by hand. The ones of mango origin are, for obvious reasons, quite narrow since the largest mango tree is only a few feet around. It’s pretty crazy to imagine someone squatting in this narrow space for several hours a day hand-lining for fish but they do it!




The narrowest dhows use outriggers to stay upright against the force of their large asymmetrical sail. M made the mistake one time of asking me about how the dhows without outriggers sailed upwind and I launched into a discussion using words like “center of lateral motion” and drawing diagrams of centerboards on napkins. He hasn’t asked again.

The boats are either pulled up onto the beach at the end of the day or anchored very close to shore. The hulls of the boats are actually burned or scorched to made them watertight. It’s always odd to come across a man burning his boat to make it more seaworthy. They use the dhows until they’re absolutely falling apart and then they abandon them on the beach.





On a run one day a few weeks ago, we came across a piece of a dhow. It was clearly the front part of the boat called the bow (rhymes with how, as does dhow coincidentally). M, always one for foraging, decided we should carry it home as a souvenir. So we took turns carrying our prize home. It was very heavy and water logged so M did most of the carrying but he was very pleased with it when we arrived home. We lay it in the sun and it is drying out nicely.



A few days later after a rough day at the lab with several ruined experiments, M looked at me and said, “Well, at the end of the day, at least we have the bow of a dhow.” This has become our funny joke and mantra whenever anything annoying or stressful happens in the lab which is quite often since Kenyan lab work is like herding feral cats. And M hates cats.

Some dhow pictures from sunrise a few weeks ago: