A retired military parachutist and park ranger is adrift in the Atlantic, hoping that wind and waves will carry his craft, a big orange barrel, safely to the Caribbean. He left Spain’s Canary Islands shortly after Christmas.
Jean-Jacques Savin, 71, built the roughly 3 metre by 2 metre capsule in a French shipyard. It’s made of resin-coated plywood and reinforced to resist attack by whales and other forces of the sea. The capsule has a small kitchen, a bunk space, storage and a porthole in the floor for viewing fish.
It’s part adventure and part working science. Savin will be dropping markers along the way for oceanographers at a marine observatory who are studying the currents. His wines on-board will be compared to bottles that stayed home to see the effects of time rolling in the sea, and Savin himself will explore the effects of solitude in close quarters.
Savin is not sure where he’ll end up, but he told reporters “I’d really like it to be a French island like Martinique or Guadaloupe. That would be easier for the paperwork and for bringing the barrel back.”
