#74 | The Bombard Story | Dr. Alain Bombard | Part 17

The seventeenth part of Brian Connell's 1953 English translation of Dr. Alain Bombard's notable 1952 French manuscript, 'The Bombard Story'.

This is the story of an unbelievable voyage, requiring huge personal sacrifice and with barely mitigated risk,  taken solely in the altruistic pursuit of furthering scientific understanding towards providing hard and fast possibilities to help 50,000 ship wreck survivors a year (at that time) hold on long enough for help to reach them.

This is a book that I have wanted to read for many years because it has direct application to the kind of survival situations I might find myself in as a pelagic mariner. 

Having personally been in a situation in a round the world yacht race where my desalination machine was reduced in it's capacity to provide fresh water down to only 250ml a day, I know what it is to be surrounded by water but not have  drop to drink.  In my situation, I was in an equatorial area with no rain showers and with two weeks sailing to the nearest land. I survived by mixing my fresh water with an equal amount of salt water and adding sugar 'to taste/not puke'   

My method worked, I finished the leg (3rd!) and I suffered no ill effects, but I am now understandably interested in discovering all I can about Dr Bombard's work and learning more about how it was possible for him to cross the Atlantic, in a rubber boat, in sixty five days with no food & no fresh water.

Let's find out together. 

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If you have any sailing books published before 1925 that you think would be an interesting read for modern sailors please contact me at [email protected] and we will see if we can bring them and their forgotten voyages back to life here on Rare Nautical Reads.