I love to go on little adventures. Whether it’s climbing a jungle pylon, or trekking in a river, or running down Europe’s biggest sand dune or trying (and failing) to hammock overnight in the Bornean rainforest, a day with an adventure in it always feels like a day well spent. That’s why when we found ourselves in a region of France which is full of lakes, we decided to build a raft and cross one.
Step 1: How to build a raft out of recycled materials.
I’ll come straight out with it and say that the instructions that follow will not make a sexy raft. It won’t look like this, like this, or (my favourite) like this. It will feel very rudimentary and that’s because it will be. But at the end of the day a raft is a raft is a raft–and this one wasn’t supposed to cross the Pacific, only a lake. Plus it’s really simple to build.
We found two broken wood pallets in a field nearby, patched them up a bit and nailed half of one of them to to the other, to make one big superpalllet. The 20L bottles we got from a friend of my grandparents, who also happens to be a marine engineer (so we made sure not to ever show him the end product for fear of reprisal). The bottles wedged pretty securely into the runs underneath the pallet, and then we tied everything up with some string. If you can’t get hold of 20L bottles, any plastic bottles will do, just make sure you wash the insides and take the labels off. And remember Archimede’s principle. If you want your raft to support 140 kg in the water (i.e roughly the weight of two adults) then you will need 140 litres worth of bottles.
Our raft had nine 20L bottles.
9 x 20 = 180 litres. So with the added buoyancy of the wood pallets to boot, we probably could have fit another adult aboard!
Step 2: The float test
Since there was a swimming pool, we thought we’d give the raft a test-run see if everything would stay together (we’d used lots of salvaged and rusty nails) and to check that we hadn’t fundamentally broken physics we’d got our maths right. Thankfully, all was well, it floated!
Step 3: Launching the raft!
Then there’s the best bit. The launch. I’ll try to stitch together a short video of us rowing across the lake because we must have looked rather weird on our zero-budget raft with plastic spade oars. In the meantime, here is Esme deciding she’s more of a solo rower after all.
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