Word: rafts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Force Weasel set out to rescue the cottagers and was swamped. A motor-launch crew tried three times to breast the gale and was blown back. Without a word to anyone, Reis Leming, clad in a rubber "exposure suit," waded into the icy waters, pushing a rubber raft ahead of him. Often the water swirled above his head, but "I just hung on until I could get a foothold again," he said...
...fishing tackle and fine-mesh nets for gathering plankton could not obtain from the sea enough food and water to stay alive-and even healthy -for weeks at a time. Determined to prove his theory, he set out from Tangier one morning last August, alone aboard a 15-ft. raft buoyed up by rubberized-fabric pontoons, and christened L'Heretique...
...young man had sailed alone on his raft for 51 days. When he boarded the British freighter Arakaka in the Atlantic three weeks ago, he had a thick, dark beard, and his rotted clothing was caked with salt and fish blood. He was a Frenchman named Alain Louis Bombard, 28, he told open-mouthed passengers and crewmen. He had set out on the raft from Las Palmas in the Canary Islands in mid-October. Since then, he had lived solely on food and drink gathered at sea: fish, sea birds, barnacles, plankton (minute animal and vegetable life floating...
...next seven weeks, he learned that his toughest problem was not food or drink but morale. The first few weeks were not so bad: the wind kept up, pushing him westward day by day, and life on the raft had not yet become grey, leaden monotony. But then the wind died away. For the next 27 days he just drifted, only now & then catching a faint breeze. Cheerful by nature, he often sank into deep troughs of depression as he looked out at the ever-empty horizon. Fortunately, there were daily chores to be done: fishing, keeping the log, plotting...
...quickly, chattering away happily in French-accented English, delighted to learn that his calculated position was only 20 miles off. He took a fresh-water bath, broke his marine diet by eating an egg and drinking coffee. After an hour and a half, he went back to his raft with some apples and a fresh battery for his radio. Passengers watched and waved until the raft dwindled to a speck on the horizon and disappeared...