La Balsa - Gabriel Salas Recollects Part Two

This extract courtesy of the Ballina Information Blog

In November 1970, a raft carrying four people arrived in Mooloolaba, Queensland, after completing a six months crossing of the Pacific Ocean.

The name of the raft was La Balsa (meaning The Raft in Spanish).

Its port of departure had been Guayaquil in Ecuador, South America. It was the first primitive raft made with natural materials that had crossed the Pacific Ocean in modern times.

It is true that in 1947 Thor Heyerdahl in his Kon-Tiki raft had sailed from South America to the first islands of the Tuamotu Archipelago.

But this was half-way across the Pacific. For this reason, the main objective of the La Balsa expedition was to again test a primitive raft and see if it could sail much further and even make it to Australia.

Like the Kon-Tiki, La Balsa had been designed in agreement with the drawings and descriptions made of similar rafts seen by Spanish sailors far away from the coasts of South America during the 16th century.

Thus La Balsa was constructed without using iron, brass, steel or any other modern material. Only balsa wood and hemp ropes made its structure. A square sail made out of canvas, supported by two hardwood masts, was added to this structure.

The designs of the Kon-Tiki and La Balsa rafts did not include a rudder, which was an invention not known in pre-Columbian South America.

The Kon-Tiki had used an oar for steering.

Instead of an oar, we used ‘guaras’, or moving keel-boards, also made out of hardwood, and inserted in between the balsa wood logs.

These guaras – still used in Ecuador – helped us to significantly improve La Balsa’s capability of sailing across the wind and not just ‘drift’ like the Kon-Tiki but choose her path between favourable winds and currents.

She was also relatively small, light and fast.

As she was made of carefully selected female balsa tree trunks, she had excellent buoyancy. La Balsa did not lose much of her navigability after spending 186 days at sea.

La Balsa became very popular in Australia. At the time, she saw much more of this country than we the crew ever did.

A few weeks after her arrival, she was mounted on a truck and sent to be displayed in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Hundreds of thousands of people saw her.

Afterwards, she was placed on a ship and sent to Spain, where her captain was born. By that time we, the crew, had all returned to our homes.

Second expedition Las Balsas:

The seaworthiness of La Balsa was a surprise to all of us.

After the 1970 expedition was completed, we knew that we could have continued travelling through the Torres Strait into the Indian Ocean and reached Africa, had we planned to do this.

Nevertheless, for a while, we thought about completing a circular trip intending to reach the first Polynesian islands and then turn south until catching the westerly winds to sail back to South America with the help of the southern winds and currents.

However, a few years later, we changed our plans and decided to fully cross the Pacific Ocean again, but this time in three rafts.

Why three rafts? Because if a fleet of three rafts could reach the other side of the Pacific and stay together, then larger numbers of rafts could have transported large amounts of people for long distances.

For example, 10 rafts could have reached anywhere in the Pacific. Or even 100 rafts, as mentioned in legends forged during South America’s pre-history.

In other words, if the navigability of rafts was so good that it was possible for them to sail fleets – as Columbus had done – then cultural interactions during the Pacific Ocean’s pre-history may not have been limited to occasional contacts.

Fleets of rafts could have transported whole ethnic groups carrying with them technology, arts, crafts, music, religion, writing, etc and thus have major impacts on the places where they arrived.

In sum, with Las Balsas we intended to show that fleets of rafts could have transported entire civilisations.

Thus, by the 21st of November of the year 1973, after covering some 9000 miles in a non-stop voyage which lasted longer than the La Balsa trip, we approached the coast of Australia in three rafts named the Guayaquil, the Mooloolaba and the Aztlán.

All were very similar to La Balsa. Although designed and equipped to sail independently, the three rafts had managed to stay within sight of each other during most of the trip.

However, just in front of Ballina we lost a raft.

So as to prevent the rafts from becoming destroyed by the surf whilst landing, we had accepted a tow by an Australian Navy ship just before reaching the coast.

Being under tow, we were suddenly struck by a storm.

As the waves and winds increased and the situation began to become dangerous, the Navy ship decided to abandon one of the rafts after taking its crew.

Thus we lost the Guayaquil five miles away from the Australian coast. The other two rafts, the Mooloolaba and the Aztlán, safely made it to Ballina.

Taken on: November 1, 1970

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