from Hacker News

The Bombard Story

by jbergstroem on 2/23/21, 12:48 AM with 36 comments

• by geocrasher on 2/23/21, 1:34 AM

  Unfortunately I lack a reference but I recall reading that Pacific Islanders have for a long time been accustomed to drinking brackish water when nothing else was available and surviving you just fine. I do believe that there is merit to drinking this water when one is already hydrated rather than waiting until dehydration and throwing the body into a drastic imbalance.

  I do know that a person can survive without food for a very long time however. Unfortunately I know this first hand as my wife slowly died from malnutrition due to a medical condition that prevented her from being able to eat. (It was not an eaying disorder if anybody is wondering). This occurred over a period of time that most people would not believe if I were to say it. But it was a very long time and it proved to me that the human body is far more resilient than most people give it credit for.

• by gerdesj on 2/23/21, 1:30 AM

  "and he also drank juice made from pressed fish he caught along the way."

  That juice is mostly water, fresh water.

  I don't know too much about the central thesis of the book ie that you can drink small quantities of sea water and continue to thrive. However I do know that several/many/most? sea predators survive purely on the water they get from their prey. Maintaining a desalination plant is probably quite costly so eating them along with work in progress seems logical.

  The main idea seems reasonably sound. You need to keep the salts gradients to within parameters that your body can deal with whilst supplying it with enough water to function. It seems fair that if you start off well hydrated and only sip small amounts, regularly then your body might be able to do the job.

  On balance, I'd concentrate on catching fish and keeping the sea water intake to a minimum.

• by delightful on 2/23/21, 1:35 AM

  “Human kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water. Therefore, to get rid of all the excess salt taken in by drinking seawater, you have to urinate more water than you drank. Eventually, you die of dehydration even as you become thirstier.”

  SOURCE: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/drinksw.html

• by 07d046 on 2/23/21, 1:41 AM

  Not just ocean water. From Wikipedia:

  > However, it appears that Bombard may have been misunderstood in regard to the possibility of survival without fresh water. Bombard has never argued that human survival is possible only by drinking seawater. On the contrary, he indicates that seawater in small quantities can prolong survival if accompanied, if rainwater is not available, by the absorption of liquids present in the bodies of fish.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bombard

• by nraynaud on 2/23/21, 2:01 AM

  I think it’s really a wrong take on it. Bombard’s lesson is mostly one of hope: you can survive a very long time on a raft. He felt too many sailors died too early after being lost at sea, while he knew of very long survivals lost at sea in the whaling community. He suspected a lot of deaths were linked to hopelessness. He set his first travel as both an experiment and an inspiration. When he came back he established a list of things to put in a life raft for long term survival.

  As for the water, his lesson has always been to drink as much fresh water as you can, and mixed with a bit of seawater if you really have to. It’s really not about surviving on seawater, his life raft list includes fresh water.

• by jbergstroem on 2/23/21, 1:17 AM

  In case the blog (wordpress) should turn unresponsive - here's a direct link to the PDF/book: http://greatestadventurers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Th...

• by heyitsguay on 2/23/21, 1:19 AM

  This seems like it'd be easy to test and important if true. Has there been any follow-up?

• by oriettaxx on 2/23/21, 9:30 AM

  did you know that, thanks to him, when somebody is lost at sea now, all search and rescue operations must last many more days.....

  So many people have been rescued thanks to his 'adventure' :)

• by aezell on 2/23/21, 2:32 AM

  One also needs to be able to filter plankton and catch fish. The ocean has increasingly fewer of these resources these days. Maybe you could survive this way 50 years ago. These days, you'd better hope you can press a plastic bottle for "juice."