Even in the face of high fuel costs and the threat of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, Anand Sankar finds the traditional shipping industry in Gujarat buzzing with life.
The video on the mobile phone is silent and grainy. The wooden boat being tossed about in the grey ocean is hard to miss. A monster wave seeks to swallow the vessel. After an agonising second, the bow thrashes out of the spray. A streak of lightning breaks the grey and the short film ends. The owner tucks the phone back into his pocket. His look says it all — it’s all in a day’s work.
Looking around Salaya, you couldn’t be further from the celluloid story. The port town on the shores of the Gulf of Kutch is a beehive of activity under the warm midday sun. The air resounds with the sound of men furiously at work. The fervour is no different 60 kilometers north across the gulf in the town of Mandvi.
Activity never stops here as they are the throbbing heart of India’s traditional shipping industry. It does send a shiver of thrill up the spine to learn that hand-built wooden boats from here still sail to distant ports in the UAE, Yemen, Oman, Eritrea, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Kenya and Somalia.
Walking along the docks, the time warp hits home. India’s modern shipping hubs of Jamnagar, Mundra and Kandla — destination for millions of tonnes of merchant shipping — are a stone’s throw away while Mandvi and Salaya have silently slipped under the radar, but are thriving nonetheless.
Adam H Bhaya, secretary, Salaya Boat Association, offers a guided tour of the dockside. A sailor himself, he claims to have documented the industry over the last two decades. He scratches his stubble and says his father and grandfather were sailors too. But it does stretch much further back than that. The industry, which dates back centuries, was largely unregulated and was only gradually brought within Indian shipping laws, post-independence.
The traditional wooden boat — dhow in Arabic and vahanvati in Gujarati — is today registered as a Mechanised Sailing Vessel. In the 1960s, wind power began to be assisted by a diesel engine and today the tables have turned, with wind power assisting the diesel engines. The cargo carrying capacity of a single vessel can range anywhere from 50 tons to 1,700 tons depending on its size. Cruising at a sedate five knots — and seven knots if the single triangular sail is pushed by a stiff breeze — it is your ticket to a trans-continental odyssey.
It is hard to pin down any one particular aspect of the panorama on the two docks, home to about 600 vessels. Huge ditches dug into the estuarine sediment are dry docks for the new boats being meticulously hewn out of 80-foot logs of hard wood harvested from the rainforests of Malaysia. Multicoloured vessels are anchored in the creek in various states of readiness — the crew lazing on the decks after a long voyage, or frantically loading fuel, freshwater and food in preparation for one.
Usman Jusup Jassaraya is busy monitoring the construction of the largest vessel in dry dock at Salaya — the 1400-ton MSV Al Yasin II. He supervises the ramming of cotton into gaps between the wooden planks all over the boat. When soaked with whale oil specially procured from Yemen, it is the boat’s only waterproofing. Jusup is flanked on his inspection by his eldest son Abdul Razzaq Jassaraya, who pilots the older MSV Al Yasin, and his grandson running along the unfinished deck. “Even he can pilot boats,”he laughs.
Progression on a dhow starts often at the age of six with errands on the docks. Education is widely accepted to be a low priority in these parts. The young apprentice then moves on to helping with the dishes, making tea, cooking, swabbing the deck... Along the way spells are spent in machine shops and at carpentry school. Eventually you have a master of a ship and other allied trades. The recruitment of sailors for voyages though has become a little stringent due to the maritime authorities insisting on seaman identity cards.
Masood Bhaya, the elderly master of the 150-ton capacity MSV Al-Sarfaraj, points to the charts on his tiny bridge. Fair weather provided, Karachi is an overnight trip, Dubai and Muscat take less than a week, and Yemen and Somalia are a fortnight away, he says. There were times when he used to sail to Basra in Iraq to pick up “high quality” dates, but that ended when his boat was trapped there for nine years during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. Subsequent conflicts in Iraq have diminished the value of the dates, he says.
Today, most of the “high quality” trade happens with — take a breath — Somalia, through the ports of Berbera and Mogadishu. It might come a surprise but even the World Bank in its trade briefs notes that India is the lawless country’s biggest trade partner — supplying it with essential basic commodities such as rice, pulses, wheat, flour and sugar and helping transport the country’s only significant export — goats — to West Asia. And all the trade is courtesy the brave seamen who set out from the Kutch and, to a lesser extent, from Mumbai, Mangalore and Calicut.
“Earlier, we used to trade with Dubai but that has shrunk due to container availability. It is only a little profitable if you go there with over 1,000 tons. But places such as Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea and Kenya have no container traffic,” says Qasam Ali Mohammed Moulik, president of the Mandvi-Kutch Vahanvati Association. A ton shipped to Somalia will cost about Rs 1,300 at the current floating freight rate.
That just about covers the journey to Somalia and any trip to destinations elsewhere from there are a bonus. Typical profit margins are estimated to be between 20 and 40 per cent and a boat usually manages five trips in a sailing season that lasts from September to May. In a unique symbiosis, trading in commodities is almost entirely the preserve of the Hindu community while sailing is dominated by the Muslim community.
“If there is no sailing to Somalia, there is no business,” says a grim Masood Bhaya, when asked about going to a country armed to the teeth with machine guns and grenade launchers. “The pirates don’t attack us because they know our worth,” says Abdul Razzaq.
A voyage to Somalia involves stocking up heavily on fuel as there are hardly any fuel depots there and fuel, if available, is exorbitantly priced. There is the unpredictable weather and now checks by multinational warships on patrol in the region to prevent terrorism and piracy. But the perks include what the sailors say is thousands of square miles of virgin sea for fishing. Tuna is part of a routine meal on board, while the delicacy is shark or, if lucky, the Indo-Pacific marlin, the massive sailfish.
Sailing in these boats is inherently risky. The two seafarers associations say on average five to six boats are lost every year. But crew safety has improved due to the now-mandatory Global Positioning System (GPS) along with such safety gear as distress radios, life preservers and fire suppression equipment.
These are a people whom you need to prod to discuss the challenges they face. The main concern is the rise in fuel costs that is increasingly making the smaller boats unprofitable. The seafarers associations say this is of concern as often cargo cannot be found to fill larger vessels to capacity. Next come the middlemen who are accused of siphoning off a chunk of the profits. But of rising concern is losing people to other trades.
“A sailor is typically guaranteed a minimum of Rs 4,000 a month, with all expenses on board being taken care of by the ship owner. Experienced sailors make as much as Rs 25,000, but there are other opportunities to make money here now, such as construction work. So why sail risking your life?” asks Abdul Karim Kataria, a shipowner. Karim, incidentally, will be the last in his family to sail as he chose to educate his only son, who works in Delhi after an MBA. “Hopefully one day he will come back and reform the business side,” he says.
It is a special trip to meet 76-year-old Shivji Bhuda Fofindi at Mandvi, as he is a rarity for two reasons. First, he is a Hindu sailor and second, he is among the last of a generation who used to pilot purely wind powered ships. Shivji, since retiring, has set up his own makeshift simulator to train young ship pilots.
He says that a pilot is most crucial as the wooden hull doesn’t take kindly to scraping against the sea bottom. He recalls that the challenge was tougher when they had to dock in a headwind, testing the nerves of even the most experienced pilot. A stickler for the basics, he says there is one thing he enjoys drilling into his pupils — using the sextant. “It is easy to use the compass. But navigators today are lost if the GPS battery dies. They are finished for good,” he laughs.
It is reassuring to note that the future of the industry is getting the right bearings.
