Photo: Facebook / TESA : Traversée de l’Atlantique en Tonneau
Jean-Jacques Savin just spent the first four months of 2019 inside a barrel in the Atlantic. If this were surfing, that would be cool. Since it’s not surfing, it’s kind of weird. But still cool.
The first time I heard about Savin’s journey he had just set out from the Canary Islands in the final week of 2018. It’s one of those stories that has all the elements of “Ok, I want to know what’s going on.” At 71-years old, he’d built a giant, 900-pound barrel. He equipped the barrel like a minuscule and uncomfortable New York City studio apartment — just enough space to lie down and fall asleep at the end of each day. He made sure to pack some foie gras and a bottle of Sauternes white wine for New Year’s Eve as well as a bottle of red Saint-Emilion for his 72nd birthday in January. And then he jumped inside the big giant barrel and let it carry him across the Atlantic Ocean for the next four months. Because why not, I guess.
After 127 days and six hours at sea, Savin successfully and safely traveled 2,930-miles from El Hierro in Spain’s Canary Islands to the tiny Dutch island of St. Eustatius. He fed himself by fishing and filtered his own water for drinking. And at one point in March, Savin did have a chance encounter with a NOAA research ship, that passed on some provisions and sent him out for the rest of his trip.
The NOAA research ship Ronald H. Brown had a chance encounter at sea with French adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin over the weekend, who is attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a barrel. pic.twitter.com/PZ2gP0QWcX
— NOAA Research (@NOAAResearch) March 27, 2019
While nothing about crossing the ocean in a barrel solo sounds particularly fun (perhaps potentially disastrous), Savin said the whole thing was pretty tame aside from about eight hours of rocky weather. In fact, weather and winds were so calm that the trip took almost 40 days longer than Savin had originally projected.
