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THE DHOWS OF THEN AND NOW BY MICHAEL PIGNÉGUY There's a dhow hull here somewhere. One of many in Doha A tourist dhow with plumbing attached to the "thunderbox" A tourist dhow with the modern city of Doha in the background I fell in love at first sight when I saw an Indian dhow, with a dozen sails set, gracefully making her way across the Indian Ocean, as the nor'easter monsoon winds took her to the exotic East African port of Mombasa. For centuries, dhows from India, Sri Lanka and Arabia have been trading with East Africa, heading downwind in the nor'easter winds after September, and waiting until June to catch the sou'wester monsoon winds to blow them home again. When I was trading around the Indian Ocean in the early 1960s, an ocean-going dhow could beat us from the Malabar Coast (on the western coast of India) to Mombasa. Mind you, the 10,000 tonne old dunga I was on could only manage 12 knots downhill with a good breeze behind us. Dhow, the generic term for a coastal or ocean-going craft in the northern Indian Ocean, is a derivation of the Swahili word dau, which means fishing boat. One can only guess that somehow the name was given to vessels trading between India and East Africa 24 Professional Skipper July/August 2011 r by the Africans and it sort of stuck! Each area, and sometimes ports, have their own names for locally built boats and these seem to be determined by both the boat's size and occupation. The basic hull design remained much the same, except some had a square stern (inherited from Spanish vessels) and others a beautiful canoe stern. On a recent visit to Doha in Qatar I was interested to see dhows are still very much in evidence in this region for carrying cargo and also fishing. The galaleef (boatbuilders) of Qatar were famed for their boatbuilding skills, but they are difficult to find these days. I could only find boats being repaired in Doha, but I did find dhows being built in Dubai. Many traditional boatbuilding methods are still in use, such as building to eye and not from a plan, and using axes, adzes, saws, awls, hammers and caulking irons, plus an assortment of tools I couldn't put a name to. In the 1960s I saw dhows with hull planks "riveted" with wooden dowels and sewn together with twine. Planks fastened together in this way are said to have more