Contrary to what was announced the day before by his team, the body of Frenchman Jean-Jacques Savin, a seventy-year-old adventurer who was trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean by rowing, was not found on board his boat, the Portuguese Navy announced on Sunday.
“The search ended yesterday at the end of the day (Saturday) without being able to find the victim,” whose boat was found off the Azores archipelago, the Lusitani Navy said in a press release.
The day before, the entourage of the 75-year-old navigator, who was known to have crossed the Atlantic in a barrel in 2019, had reported that his body had been found “lifeless” inside his boat from the cabin of the dinghy. Ludacio.
In response to a question by AFP on Sunday evening, a Portuguese navy spokeswoman explained that during the rescue operation, rescuers had “strong reasons to believe that a body might be inside.”
“There were ambiguities we are trying to clarify. We don’t know more. We are waiting for information from the Portuguese authorities,” the adventurer’s team told AFP in France.
– Documents found –
“Unfortunately, since 12:34 am yesterday (Friday), we no longer have any contact or any demonstration from him,” members of his team told AFP on Saturday morning. According to them, he set off my distress beacon, “indicating that he’s ‘in great difficulty”.”
The Septuagint was found upside down, as evidenced by the photo published by the Portuguese Navy where we see the hull of the boat floating on the surface, and then being hoisted onto one of his cruisers.
The first merchant marine vessel to arrive at the location from which the alert had departed reported that “it saw the boat and the navigator in the early hours of Friday, January 21, but when they approached the boat it indicated that the man was no longer there.”
“One of the merchant ships collected a waterproof bag containing the navigator’s identity documents,” the Portuguese navy said.
During the last contacts, Jean-Jacques Savin was north of Madeira, offshore, and was on his way to the island of Ponta Delgada, in the Azores archipelago, for repair.
Because shortly after leaving Sagres (southern Portugal) on January 1, this great athlete was quickly transformed by high winds. Thus his initial route was extended by 900 km and then encountered serious power and communication problems.
– ‘The irony of old age’ –
And on Wednesday, Jean-Jacques Savin, on his Facebook page, reported “extreme bloating and strong wind”, adding that he had to “use a manual sweetener”. “This is costing me physical energy,” he wrote. “Don’t worry, I’m not in danger!”
Living in Aris, in the Arcachon Basin, in southwest France, he intended to paddle across the Atlantic to become “the dean of the Atlantic,” a “way of sarcasm of old age.”
He had celebrated his 75th birthday on January 14 aboard his canoe, which is eight meters long and 1.70 meters wide, equipped with two cabins and a rowing station.
He laughed shortly before he left: “I’m going on vacation to the open sea, I’m taking three months off.”
In 2019, this slender and muscular ex-soldier spent more than four months in a barrel-shaped boat measuring three meters long and 2.10 meters in diameter. And so he had crossed the Atlantic Ocean alone, driven by winds and currents.
This former private pilot and curator of a national park in Africa joined the West Indies, which he hoped to rejoin by kayaking.
