Visible manila rope tying together the raft
From BearWiki
Confirmed: Bear's raft was tied together with rope.
According to show consultant Celeste Cole[1]:
"As you might have guessed, I just returned from 3 weeks consulting, and guiding wilderness survival skills on a beautiful island in the south Pacific.
...
"These amazing voyagers have become an inspiration to me for a humble challenge I was given while in Hawaii. This challenge was to design and construct a primitive vessel by hand, using primitive techniques that could travel at least 50 miles in open ocean, in a week, complete with sail, no less! I did meet the challenge though it was not completely accomplished in one week, it took a few more days, and of course I did cheat using rope instead of natural cordage on most of the raft. But it was an incredible experience, and the best part of the whole thing is that the raft floated, was self-bailing, and rode easily in the wave not bouncing and yawing like traditional watercraft will. It held together in some very rough and nasty weather including heavy ocean swell, and withstood the challenge of Princess, a 16′ Tiger Shark, who became curious of the raft and to get a sense of what this object might be, gummed the aft section of the raft with her massive jaws! Wow! This can be a problem with Tigers, if they don’t know what you are, they may gum you to see if you are food, while it really didn’t damage the raft, this gumming could very easily damage or cause one to bleed profusely and quickly end our fun. (I highly recommend Jimmy & Stephanie of hawaiisharkencounters.com for a shark encounter experience, their super folks and Stephanie is very informative regarding shark behavior.) I had great help in building the raft as well, (which was christened lovingly the “Celeste”, complete with champagne and hurrahs.) and I would like to thank Mike and Jennifer of Kualoa Ranch, also Brian, and Frank for working so hard on the project. I hope to have pictures of the “Celeste” available in a few weeks to view, along with Princess the Tiger Shark!"
Celeste was the consultant who also admitted that Bear shipped horses in for the "wild" horses in the Sierras episode. The rope is visible in many places in the video[2].
