FLIPFLOPI

When I first read about the idea to try and build a boat made entirely from recycled plastic collected from beaches in Kenya, I thought the guys involved were crazy.

We had recently moved to Nairobi after my wife got a job there and I stumbled upon their story in a local magazine. Ben Morison, Ali Skanda and Dipesh Pabari had founded an organisation called Flipflopi to raise awareness about plastic pollution – especially the thousands of discarded flip-flops and tons of single-use plastic that wash ashore along Kenya’s coastline every year. Now they wanted to show that this waste could be put to good use and were working with traditional boatbuilders on Lamu Island to build a 20-metre dhow, the beautiful sailing boats made in East Africa, which they planned to sail down to the tip of the continent.

I could immediately see from their plans that they would have some serious technical problems.