Stand at La Balsa Park at Point Cartwright.

Look beyond the picnickers and children playing on the shores of the Mooloolah River, catch sight of the small sign with four names on it.

Below it is four sets of footprints set in concrete. Mementos of the past.

Yet they serve as a reminder of how the Sunshine Coast has changed in almost 38 years.

Mooloolaba was just a dot on the map until four ragged men turned up in 1970, aboard a raft made of balsa logs cut from the forests of Ecuador.

After sailing 161 days and 8565 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean they showed what the human spirit could achieve.

I had been intrigued by the story for many years and jumped at the chance to research it for the Sunshine Coast Daily’s series of features Where Are They Now? Through the years I held the vision in my mind of a wild-bearded American being washed up on the beach.

Yet I had the wrong man and the wrong raft trip … that was William Willis.

Willis – in two great adventures, rafted single-handed across the Pacific.

The first was from South America to Samoa, 6700 miles - 2200 miles further than Thor Heyerdahl in his Kon Tiki raft journey in 1947.

In a second great voyage, Willis rafted all the way from South America to Australia.

The image I had was of a newspaper photo of him coming ashore at Mission Beach in North Queensland.

Instead, it was Marcel Modena, Gabriel Garces, Normand Tetreaul, their Spanish captain Vital Alsar and a cat, Minet, who created history when they made their epic raft voyage across the Pacific to prove that travel and contact between South America and Australasia was possible – testing the theory that natives could have made the journey in the past.

The arrival of the raft La Balsa was the lead news story around the country on the morning of November 5, 1970, when the Mooloolaba-based fishing boat Capri found the four men in tattered clothes off Double Island Point.

The Capri arrived at Mooloolaba about 10pm that night and there were media from all over Australia.

It was moored it in the middle of the river, opposite the Mooloolaba Yacht Club.

The story became top news around the world and the Sunshine Coast basked in its greatest-ever publicity boost to that time.

The late Eddie De Vere was Maroochy Shire Chairman at the time and was quick to size up the publicity bonanza.

He was on hand to greet the four crewmen late at night and the press conference arranged by him at Mooloolaba Yacht Club in the early hours of the Friday morning was considered a master stroke.

There had been chaos as press, radio and television men stampeded to get their stories.

The translator was the Nambour Chronicle’s Maroochydore correspondent Edith St Clair-Telford.

Cars were parked the full length of Parkyn Parade as sightseers flocked to see the raft.

A street parade was held in Nambour that rivalled the 1954 celebrations for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

La Balsa was eventually towed to the Brisbane River then lifted out of the water and taken to a shopping centre at Mt Gravatt to go on display before being shipped back to Peru.

The historic expedition became the longest non-stop raft voyage in recorded history, almost doubling the distance of the Kon Tiki expedition which travelled from Peru to Tahiti in 1947.

I thought the crew must have just gone their separate ways after that epic voyage ... drifted off into the distance so to speak, but the more I go into it the better it gets.

Vital Alsar returned a few years later with three rafts ... Las Balsas, making it to Ballina, then he set off on a raft journey down the Amazon for what was the first of eight crossings of the Atlantic.

As Vital Alsar wrote: "Survival depends on the total cooperation of all men, whether their world is a raft, a village, a country or a planet."

So take the time to stand at La Balsa Park and reflect on what we have here on the Sunshine Coast.

Listen for a moment to the distinctive sound of the breeze in the casuarinas … like the breath of the spirits from times past.