LISBON (Reuters) – French adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin, who set off in a rowboat from Portugal on Jan. 1 to cross the Atlantic solo, has vanished at sea together with his boat discovered overturned and empty close to the Azores archipelago, Portugal’s navy stated.
The 75-year-old Savin’s help staff had stated in a Facebook put up on Saturday that his physique had been discovered contained in the cabin of his glossy, purpose-built boat Audacious, however late on Sunday issued one other assertion signed by his daughter Manon that the physique had not been recovered.
“To date now we have no official affirmation from the Portuguese maritime authorities,” she wrote.
A Portuguese Navy assertion on Sunday stated a seek for Savin’s boat started after a misery sign despatched simply earlier than midnight on Thursday. The search concerned a naval corvette, three plane and several other service provider ships, one in all which discovered a water-resistant bag with Savin’s paperwork inside, it stated.
They situated the boat capsized in turbulent seas and managed to carry it onto the naval ship on Saturday.
The search was referred to as off after that, with an advisory issued to ships in the world alerting them to the potential for discovering the shipwrecked adventurer.
“There have been no additional sightings or data since,” a navy spokeswoman stated on Monday.
Savin celebrated his seventy fifth birthday at sea on Jan. 14.
On Jan. 19, he posted about issues with the photo voltaic charger of his water desalinator, however stated he was “not in hazard”, as he was heading in the direction of the mid-Atlantic port of Ponta Delgada in the Azores with honest wind.
“There’s a lovely marina with an airport subsequent door. If I need to repair it (charger) I’ll have all the pieces I want in place,” he wrote then. “My objective is to go so far as I can every day so long as the wind is with me!”
In 2019, Savin crossed the Atlantic in a barrel-shaped capsule, from Spain’s Canary Islands to the Caribbean.
(Reporting by Andrei Khalip, enhancing by Inti Landauro and Mark Heinrich)
