The kind of silence that seems endless. On Friday, the adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin, 75, who left on January 1 to row across the Atlantic, triggered his distress beacons. Since then, his team has been waiting for a sign. “Unfortunately, since 00:34 (Friday) morning, we have no longer had any contact or any demonstration from him,” she said on Saturday.
“Our concern is great as you can imagine”, adds the team, which specifies that the adventurer triggered “his two distress beacons indicating to us to be in great difficulty “. In a text intended for her friends and AFP, Manon, the daughter of Jean-Jacques Savin, affirms that “we are of course very worried. Everything was immediately implemented in coordination with the French, Portuguese and American sea rescue services”.
The team is in particular in contact with the CROSS Gris-Nez (Pas-de-Calais), in charge of rescue at sea for French sailors. According to the communication manager of the volunteer team, Jean-Jacques Savin was at the time of the last contacts, offshore, north of Madeira and was on his way to the small island of Ponta Delgada, in the Azores archipelago, to fix. After being rerouted due to bad winds and having considerably lengthened his planned route, the septuagenarian encountered serious problems with breakdowns of electric batteries and solar collectors.
A regular in full-bodied challenges
Jean-Jacques Savin, a resident of Arès in the Arcachon basin, left Sagres (southern Portugal) on January 1 to try to row across the Atlantic in a canoe and become “the dean of the Atlantic”, “a way of taunting old age”.
He had celebrated his 75th birthday on January 14 aboard his “Audacieux” canoe, eight meters long, 1.70 m wide, equipped with two cabins, forward and aft, and a rowing, in the middle. “I’m going on vacation to the open sea, I’m taking three months of vacation,” he said shortly before his departure to AFP.
In 2019, this former soldier had spent more than four months in a barrel-shaped boat three meters long and 2.10 m in diameter to cross the Atlantic alone, tossed about by the winds and currents.
