Thor Heyerdahl may have been an intrepid sailor, but ancient South Americans apparently weren't.
Eventually Mr Heyerdahl did find a publisher brave enough to take on his saga.
The expedition was launched from Peru by anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl to demonstrate that South Americans could have settled Polynesia.
Two of Heyerdahl's grandchildren, Olav Heyerdahl and Josian Heyerdahl, will be aboard during various legs of the Plastiki voyage.
The raft stood up to Pacific storms and Mr Heyerdahl and his friends supplemented their diet with algae strained through cloth.
In 2006 Heyerdahl's 29-year old grandson Olav set out from Callao, Peru, to retrace the journey of the Kon-Tiki in his own boat.
"Waves were breaking out on the blue see, " Heyerdahl later wrote.
The Plastiki's name is wordplay off the "Kon-Tiki, " a balsa raft made famous by Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl, who in 1947 sailed the vessel from Peru to the Polynesian islands.
Mr Heyerdahl said that he and his five companions had felt a bit tired when they landed on a Polynesian reef after 101 days at sea, but were otherwise fit.
The former is familiar with some of the terrain, having previously replicated his grandfather's expedition using the original log books and diary used by Heyerdahl, and taking the opportunity to track changes in the Pacific's environmental conditions.
Using balsa wood and other materials that would have been available in antiquity, Mr Heyerdahl built the Kon-Tiki, named after a mythical South American king said to have been fleeing for his life, and launched her from Peru.
Although Heyerdahl did take some modern equipment -- such as radios, charts and a sextant -- he argued these were all incidental to testing the theory that the craft itself could make the 4, 300 mile journey across some of the most challenging seas on Earth.
But the most important result for Mr Heyerdahl was that money from his writing allowed him to spend a vastly interesting life pursuing a number of unorthodox notions, some of them plausible, some of them cranky, all of them infuriating to those whose theories he was challenging.
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