Building the Dhow
Saa Moja

In my early 50's I was a university lecturer in Pholosophy. I made visits and did research in Uganda, about which I wrote a Dutch book called Ik heb een fiets in Jinja. I got kicked off my University (not by a general redundancy problem but for personally being a singularly useless, nay, counter productive scholar), quit, retired early and moved to Uganda ^{[Getting set for Uganda, About me]}. In 2004 I moved to Jinja, Uganda, at Lake Victoria, where the Nile starts its long journey to Egypt. I had agreed to rent a little lake house on poles, near the Nile source, that would be ready at my arrival. But when I got there I saw this:

Time to consider other options [ source page]

Time to consider other options! I decided to study the feasibility of using a big traditional dhow as my house boat to roam the lake. In search for suitable ship yards around the lake I ended up in Mwanza, Tanzania, at the South side of the lake. Talking to traditional African ship builders, it became clear that even total disaster would be affordable, so I plunged in a contract with one of them. My idea was just to let them start with my requirement of 18 m length and 2 meter interior main cabin height - to save my back.
We would use mninga wood, a protected tropical hardwood that is highly unpopular among wood boring lake insects. The problem of buying wood is that if you pay on delivery you will see no wood because your trader has no money to buy it. But if you pay an advance, your trader is likely to disappear with the money.

The struggle for wood was hard but finally victorious [source pages starting at: No Wood]

Building started. Of course, no drawings, no tape measures. Just fitting the previous piece of wood to the next. They thought it was going to take them three months or so. I had a complete design in my computer, but only as a personal private reference. They have never even seen it. I resolved only to intensify my interference when I would clearly see the need, to let them work as much as possible according to their tradition. But the needs came. Not mainly, as I expected, customization needs. It was far worse: apart from the disappearance of my money advances [details on source page: Classical African Business Doldrums and succeeding dhow logbook pages] they were heading for a completely unseaworthy matchbox.  

Time had come for serious interference with the process. Consulting other Mwanza ship builders, I decided for stiffening the structure with various means

Stiffening: left: four rows of strong beams (brown) blocking lateral movements. Middle: metal triangle L-shape bars (red) blocking skewing movements, right: Rail under keel and stern corner stiffener.

The right side structure on the left photo is the stern-starboard stiffener. It was meant to be the mirror image of the left one . I propose to give it a place in the history of mathematics under the name of the welder: "Shire polyhedron". I decided to mount it as it is, a true museum piece and to sell entrance tickets to anyone who wishes to see it. Right picture: Shire Polyhedron mounted

[Source pages on stiffening and customizing: the greetings page Back in Ship Yard Supplies and succeeding pages]

The name of the dhow was going to be Saa Moja. That means "hour one", which is 7 o'clock western time, which is, at the equator, sun rise and sun set. On days when work started late or went slow, I told the workers I would call the dhow Saa Moja Na Dakika Kumi Na Tano ("hour one and a quarter"), a threat with did seem to have some effect. After more than a year, in which I had to learn the skills of an army commander, slave-driver, imbecile supervisor, detective, ship builder, ship yard director and with a lot of luck too, the dhow was launched to be finished floating in Bwiru Bay, Mwanza.

The spectacular day of moving the dhow over 1 km and launching her. The day before I told the contractor that 1. this plan of rolling the dhow on two trolleys was absolutely unfeasible. 2. I called witnesses to let the contractor declare his exclusive responsibility 3. I told I would only be there as a tourist to take photographs

February 5, 2006: I could not believe my eyes: they succeeded! (Far in the yellow at 1 km: the ship yard from where they pushed the dhow). [Source page:  Launching]