Alex Rust is no more. Typhoid fever took him away in May 2013 at only 28 years old. But what remains of him is a beautiful documentary (titled “Chasing Bubble,” which we show below) that tells her incredible story and her even more incredible transformation. From Indiana farm boy (born 1984) to globetrotting sailor, completely self-taught. After getting fed up with his life as a day trader (stock trader or private investor who buys and sells the same stocks within the same day) in Chicago, a city to which he had moved from the countryside, decided to purchase Bubbles, a Fast Passage 39 (twelve-meter 1976 built in Canada by Philbrooks to a design by William Garden).
KILLED BY TYPHUS
He picked up the boat at Nanny Cay in the British Virgin Islands and returned here after a three-year circumnavigation. But with a twinkle in his eye: he realized his life was no longer in the States, so he left for India where he worked in orphanages, and where he contracted the typhoid fever that killed him.
THE “BEST OF” MOMENTS FROM ALEX’S TRIP
A DOCUMENTARY WORTH A LIFETIME
Before he died, Alex was working on a documentary: he had filmed everything, from the rituals of crossing the Equator in the middle of the Pacific to feasting in huts with the last cannibals along the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, not to mention encounters with pirates, hurricanes, and islands that had not been visited by a human being for 40 years. Rust worked for months and months collecting interviews done with those who boarded Bubbles, stage by stage. Friends, relatives, coworkers, foreigners, vagrants, bartenders. This is his documentary. This is his story.
CHASING BUBBLES, THE DOCUMENTARY BY (AND ABOUT) ALEX RUST
The Rust family has launched a funding campaign to honor Alex’s wish to help children: if you would like to lend a hand, click here
