Forget being up a creek with a proverbial paddle. France’s Jean-Jacques Savin just made it across the Atlantic in a barrel.
Savin spent more than four months cooped up inside and floating across the Atlantic in a giant orange barrel, before floating ashore at the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius in early May.
Savin, 71, a former military paratrooper who has also climbed Mont Blanc, set off from the Canary Islands off Africa on Dec. 26, 2018, in his homemade contraption. Without the benefit of oars or a paddle, he averaged about 2 mph the entire 2,930-mile journey, reliant solely on the whims of the ocean’s current, dropping pin markers en route to help scientists monitor the currents.
“Everything has an end … finally, here I am at the end of this adventure,” he wrote on his Facebook page, after a diving center welcomed his ashore.
Savin’s barrel is about 10 feet long and seven feet wide, and includes a small kitchen and bed. He subsisted largely on fish and provisions he brought along, including a bottle of wine to celebrate his birthday.
Web info here: http://www.atlantique-tonneau.com