So how do you launch a Peruvian surfing raft? Carefully and with due ceremony

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve had a 16-year-old Swiss exchange student called Matthieu staying with us. His English is still fairly limited and I’ve been under strict instructions from my wife not to speak to him in French (not that my French is much better than his English), so communication has been tricky at times. That said, I think we’ve managed to get by OK, although I’m pretty sure that when he returns to Geneva he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that the family he stayed with in Scotland were eccentric-verging-onabsolument-fou. I think he probably suspected we were a bit odd from the start, but if not the events of last Sunday will have made up his mind.

First thing in the morning, he would have woken up and looked out of the window to see me staggering around in the street below, wrestling what looked a lot like a 12-foot long straw boat onto the roof of the car. Then, after a 45-minute drive out to East Lothian, he would have watched, no doubt with a slight sense of bewilderment, as my friend Steve and I unloaded the boat and carried it a mile or so through a forest to an outof-the-way stretch of beach. And then things would have got really trippy for him. He would’ve seen our kids and our friends’ kids decorating the boat with wild flowers; he would have seen me pouring a miniature bottle of whisky over it while mumbling a few unintelligible words; and then he would have seen various people, both young and old enough to know better, taking it in turns to paddle around on this strange-looking craft using a long bamboo pole, kneeling on it, lying down on it or sitting astride it as if it were a horse. Fortunately The

Wicker Man never really took off over in Switzerland, or young Matthieu might have done a runner for fear of meeting a sticky end.

Of course, we had no intention of sacrificing the Swiss boy in some bizarre pagan ritual, and I’m about 70 per cent certain that we managed to communicate that fact to him in a way that he was able to understand. What we were actually doing, as regular readers of this column will hopefully have guessed by now, was testing out a traditional Peruvian fishing and surfing raft called a caballito de totora.

Having rescued this specimen from the Eyemouth Maritime Museum after it went into receivership and was forced to auction off its wonderful collection of boats, I was keen to try it out, and so were various surfing friends. Made out of bundles of Californian bulrushes lashed together with rope, the caballito is thought to be the earliest man-made device specifically designed for riding waves, and they are still built and used today by fishermen in northwestern Peru. What surfer wouldn’t want to experiment with a surf craft that pre-dates even the earliest Hawaiian surfboards?

After a bit of poking around on the internet I’d managed to find a UK bamboo specialist that sold guadua, the giant bamboo the Peruvians use for paddles, and ordered a 2m long stem split down the middle. Then, with the surf forecast calling for small waves that wouldn’t smash the caballito to a pulp, the only thing left to do was get it into the water.

The initial plan had been to launch it somewhere near a car park so we wouldn’t have to carry it too far (it weighs about 90lbs when dry, and considerably more than that once the reeds become waterlogged), but beaches that are easy to get to tend to get crowded, and the last thing I wanted was to injure an innocent bystander with a 12-foot long wicker torpedo. So, just to be on the safe side, I picked one of the hardest-to-get-acaballito-to beaches on the east coast.

I had tried and failed to find out about traditional caballito launching rituals online, so in the end we improvised with flowers and whisky. For the first ten minutes or so out on the water, the boat smelled amazing. Turns out the caballito is a brilliant bit of design too – its double-cylinder keel is surprisingly stable, even when paddling side-on to an incoming swell, and its curved prow allows it to glide easily through approaching waves, as well as preventing what surfers call pearling (nose-diving) when riding back in.

At high tide there wasn’t much surf, but the waves picked up later on as the tide dropped. Our eldest, age six, had made a friend called Elodie (seven) on the beach and was keen for her to get a shot on the funny straw boat with him. As the first little swells of the afternoon started to roll in, these two became, if not the first people ever to ride a wave on a caballito in Scottish waters, then at least junior members of a very small club.

The caballito’s curved prow allows it to glide easily through approaching waves