Please don’t try this yourself, but you’ve got to give a lot of credit for courage and an adventuresome spirit to Jean-Jacques Savin, a 71-year-old former French paratrooper, who’s now trying to cross the Atlantic in a big orange plywood barrel, propelled only by the ocean currents that he hopes will carry him to the Caribbean. “I have the soul of a sportsman and am using my retirement to set myself a number of challenges,” he told The Telegraph, just before he shoved off from El Hierro in the Canaries.
Savin has already sailed across the Atlantic a few times, and he’s worked as a pilot and a park ranger in Africa. He’s studied ocean currents for many years, and he thinks he can make it to the Caribbean in three months; he has no sails or oars. He built the barrel himself, using reinforced plywood. It’s not quite ten feet long, weighs about 1,000 pounds, and has a galley, a bunk, a chart table and storage space. To entertain himself, Savin brought along his mandolin, and he’s making daily entries in a diary.
True to his French heritage, Savin is taking a block of foie gras and a bottle of red Saint-Emillion that he plans to open on Jan. 14th, his 72nd birthday. He doesn’t know where in the Caribbean he will end up, but he’s hoping it will be the French islands of Martinique or Guadeloupe. Read more:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/27/frenchman-71-sets-sail-across-atlantic-barrel/
