Get water from fish, and vitamins from a sock

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-16 18:34

10 years ago, a man passed away who had done an amazing deed. Moreover, the act was absolutely altruistic … Alain Bombard was the doctor on duty at the Boulogne hospital when 43 sailors were brought there - victims of the shipwreck at the Carnot pier. None of them were saved.

An experiment by French physician Alain Bombard saved tens of thousands of shipwrecked people

Alain reproached himself for not being able to do anything for them. He began collecting information about shipwrecks. It turned out that around the world in such disasters, about 200 thousand people die every year. Of these, 50 thousand manage to get over to lifeboats and rafts, but all the same, after a while they die a painful death.

"Is there really nothing you can do for them?" thought Bombar. He soon found out strange things. First, 90% of the victims died within the first three days after the shipwreck. But during this time neither hunger nor thirst can kill a person ?! And secondly, it turned out that from the point of view of physiology, the sea gives us absolutely everything to survive.

To prove the validity of his assumptions, Bombar in 1952 decided on an unusual experiment: imitating a shipwreck, he sets off on a rescue rubber boat on a solo voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. He had no water or food: a sealed container with an emergency supply of food was never opened during the 65-day trip.

During his voluntary wanderings, Bombar lost 25 kg in weight. His skin peeled off in shreds, his toenails fell out. He reached the coast with severe anemia and near-fatal hemoglobin levels. But he proved that a person is able to survive for months at sea without any means.

By the way, his wife and newborn daughter were waiting for him on the shore.

Such a game was worth the candle. The rules of survival, which Bombar formulated in his own experience, saved the lives of tens of thousands of sailors and travelers.

The sea will not let you die of thirst

It is believed that a person can live no more than 10 days without water. Bombar only on the 23rd day of the voyage was able to drink fresh water, falling into a strip of torrential rain. How did he survive? I used seawater!

“Alas, you cannot drink sea water for more than five days in a row,” Alain specified. - I say this as a doctor, otherwise you can ruin the kidneys. You need to take a break of at least three days. And then this cycle can be repeated."

During these three days Bombar was getting water from … fish! Every student knows that living organisms for the most part consist of water. For example, ocean fish is 80 percent fresh water. How to extract this water from fish? Bombar cut the meat into small pieces and squeezed out the liquid with a shirt. It turned out to be a slurry of fat and juice, disgusting in taste, but insipid. With a large fish it is easier: you can make incisions on its body and immediately drink the juice. To provide yourself with water, it is enough to catch three kilos of fish a day.

French physician Alain Bombard. Photo: wikimedia.org

Plankton is a cure for scurvy

Bombar got his first fish with a harpoon - he made it with a penknife on an oar. Alain made a hook out of fish bones (he already had a fishing line - it is included in the rescue kit), and some of the meat was used as bait. The inventive Frenchman did not experience problems with the catch. Moreover, the fish regularly flew to him for breakfast on a regular basis. “Almost every morning I found 3-4 flying fish in the boat. They bumped into my sail at night and fell to the bottom,”Bombar recalled. He ate some of the fish raw, and some dried on board the boat according to the method of the fisherman Santiago from Hemingway's story "The Old Man and the Sea" (gutted, cut into pieces and dried in the sun. - Ed.).

To avoid scurvy, the navigator ate plankton every day - it is rich in vitamin C. “It was enough to throw an ordinary sock on a rope overboard to get a total of two tablespoons of plankton during the day,” Bombar assured. “Unlike raw fish, it tastes good. The feeling that you are eating lobsters or shrimps."

Trust in yourself

If you think that the crews of the ships you meet are only thinking about picking up those in distress, then you are cruelly mistaken. “For passenger ships, the most important thing is the timetable. It is even more important than the lives of the shipwrecked,”Bombar argued from his own experience. Many ships sailed past Alain of his tiny boat without bothering to stop. “Think in advance how you will signal yourself if you come across a ship. Depending on the resources at your disposal, you can semaphore with a mirror, blow a whistle, fire a rocket launcher, wave your arms or yell at the top of your lungs …"

Even wet clothes keep you warm

Bombar refused waterproof overalls. He was wearing regular pants, a shirt, a sweater and a jacket. The Frenchman believed that he was already superbly equipped. After all, when a ship sinks, a person usually does not have time to think about his wardrobe. Already on the second day after sailing, getting soaked through, Bombar discovered that even wet clothes retain body heat. So another rule was born: "A shipwrecked person should not take off his clothes, even if they are wet."

Sharks are not the worst

Meeting with these predators does not pose a great threat. “When they started to get bored, I just hit them in the face with an oar and they swam away,” Bombar recalled. “Sometimes they tried to give the boat their teeth, but try to bite the soccer ball!” The whales can easily flip the boat, but they were very delicate and did not misbehave. Birds were the biggest deceivers. Usually those in distress believe: if birds appear, it means that the coast is not far away. Crafty liars visited Bombar when there were at least 2,000 kilometers to the ground. The worst thing is if the wave drowns the vessel on which you are sailing. “In this case, I had a bottle of poison in my shirt pocket. If the irreparable happens, why be exhausted and flounder aimlessly for the terrible thirty hours? - admitted later the fearless Alain. However, he himself fought to the last for his life, which hung by a thread hundreds of times.

Photo: Dmitry POLUKHIN

Performance characteristics of the boat

Bombar traveled in a rubber punt, which he gave the name "The Heretic." This was the name of Bombar himself by skeptics, who considered his ideas heresy. The length of the vessel is 4 meters 65 centimeters. Width - 1 meter 90 centimeters. The boat was a tightly inflated rubber sausage bent in the shape of an elongated horseshoe. The ends of the "horseshoe" were connected by a wooden stern.

The side floats were divided into several independent compartments, and in the event of a puncture of one of them, the boat would remain afloat. A wooden platform lay on the rubber bottom. “If I could not stand on it, I would definitely have earned gangrene,” Bombar recalled. The punt was driven by a quadrangular sail with an area of about three square meters.

Vicissitudes of Fate

A Nine Life Mistake

Thanks to Bombard's experiment, the London Maritime Safety Conference decided to equip ships with inflatable rafts. They have proven to be effective as a lifesaver. It happened in 1960. But Bombar himself no longer took part in this.

Alain had been involved in the development of a life raft for the French Navy two years earlier. The tests took place in the surf strip at the mouth of the Ethel River. Bombara was accompanied by six volunteers. A giant shaft overturned the raft. The Coast Guard boat picked up the participants in the experiment, but the waves turned the boat too! There were 14 people in the air cushion under the bottom of the vessel. Bombar managed to get out of the trap and swam for help. But nine people could not be saved. Alain became depressed and even tried to commit suicide. After that, he changed his field of activity and for many years studied the biology of the sea.