My ocean voyage from hell

Kenya

Wondering what this year will bring, at dawn this morning I stood in the waves in front of our beach house and watched two Swahili sailing dhows battling through monsoon surf, heading out to the fishing grounds. For 1,500 years mariners off our East African coast have voyaged in these lovely boats and now, just in the past couple of years, fibreglass hulls have started to replace teak planking, and outboard motors instead of lateen sails propel men across the ocean. I was looking at the end of a long history. In my life I’ve enjoyed wonderful sea safaris on dhows, hunting for tuna and ambergris and waves to surf — and I wonder what’s ahead.

We realised things were becoming risky when everybody, including the crew, began wailing and praying

I didn’t know what was ahead in the late 1980s when I worked as a stringer for the FT in Tanzania, but every weekend I would head down to the bandari or port of Dar es Salaam and catch an overnight dhow to Zanzibar. ‘Stinkibar’ was only just opening up after decades of revolutionary socialism. In Stone Town, I would stay in crumbling palaces for a few bob, rent a Vesper, hang green coconuts on the handlebars to go with my bottle of rum and zoom off to sleep on the empty eastern beaches. Zanzibar was on my beat and on one assignment, I spent a fortnight on the archipelago covering the annual budget, which derived mainly from the economy of cloves. You have no idea how gorgeous Zanzibar was then, before tourism spoiled it like everywhere else in the world.