An impulse bid at a museum sell-off puts a surfing artefact from Peru within my reach
Other highlights of the collection now up for sale include a wedding gondola from Venice
By the time you read this, there’s a decent chance that I will have become the proud owner of a caballito – a traditional Peruvian raft made out of dried bulrushes. In a moment of madness late on Sunday night I made a bid for one in an online auction, and at time of writing, with the clock ticking down slowly but surely towards the end of the bidding period, I’m still the only person who appears to want it. In fact, there are currently six of these things for sale via the same auction house, and I seem to be the only person showing an interest in any of them.
What do I want with a second-hand straw raft? Well, the caballito isn’t really a raft – it’s a wave-riding vehicle, and not just any old wave riding vehicle. Expert opinion is divided, but within the surfing world there are many who believe that the caballito is the original surf craft, older even than the first surfboards built by the Hawaiians. To a surfer, then, this is an artefact of real cultural importance, and not something you can easily pick up on your local high street.
In his Encyclopedia of Surfing, surf archivist extraordinaire Matt Warshaw states that the caballito (literally “little horse”) is made from the dried stalks of the totora plant, or California bulrush, and has been used by Peruvian fishermen for over 5,000 years. On average, he writes, they are 12 feet long, two feet wide, weigh 90 pounds, and “last for about six weeks before they get waterlogged and decompose.” Given that the surf industry is still struggling to come up with a fully biodegradable surfboard after many years of trying, that last detail is more than a little ironic.
The caballito I have my eye on has come up for sale under unhappy circumstances: it is just one of some 270 “boats of significance” being auctioned off after the Eyemouth
International Sailing Craft Association (EISCA), the charity which previously administered the World of Boats museum in Eyemouth, went into receivership. Other highlights of the collection now up for sale include a wedding gondola from Venice; a Brazilian log raft called a jangada; a colourful double outrigger canoe from Bali called a junkung; a sharp-bowed Maltese vessel called a kajjik; and an umla, a beach-launched fishing boat from the Gulf of Oman.
Some of these boats have amazing stories to tell. “Le Shark,” for example, was the plywood ocean rowing boat Jim Shekhdar used to make the first non-stop row across the Pacific in 2001; a sampan in the collection, meanwhile, was apparently used by a North Vietnamese family to escape to Hong Kong during the Vietnam War. It was initially hoped that the collection might be snapped up by a single buyer, and therefore kept together, but the deadline for single bids expired on 21 July. All those sampans, jangadas, umlas and kajjiks now seem destined to go their separate ways.
As do the caballitos. Since making my impulse bid, I’ve turned into a bit of a caballito anorak, and thanks to the power of the interweb I’ve become aware of the modern-day Peruvians like fisherman Carlos Ucañan who have devoted much time and energy to keeping this remarkable tradition alive. Ucañan still makes caballitos the old-fashioned way, cutting the giant reeds himself, drying them in the sun for three weeks and then binding them together into the bundles which will eventually form the raft. To get out beyond the breaking surf he uses a paddle made from a large, hollow reed sliced down the middle, and rather than sitting in or on the caballito he sits astride it as he paddles – hence “little horse”.
You might not think that a 12-foot long bundle of reeds weighing in at 90 pounds would be the most nimble of surf craft, and you’d be right. Nevertheless, once he’s stroked into a wave and hopped to his feet with a single, impressively energetic thrust of his pelvis, Ucañan is able to manoeuvre it surprisingly well by dragging the blade of his paddle in the wave face.
As a cultural ambassador for his hometown of Huanchaco near Truillo, in north-western Peru, Ucañan has travelled as far afield as Australia giving caballito demonstrations and presenting an alternative take on surfing history. He’s met legends of the sport including Rabbit Bartholomew and Cheyne Horan and taught some of today’s top pros the art of caballitoriding, notably Sofia Mulanovich and Sally Fitzgibbons.
As it turns out, the Eyemouth caballitos are also from Huanchaco. If Ucañan didn’t make them himself, you can’t help feeling he’d probably know the people who did.