The Explorer has been pursuing for more than ten years his Polar Pod Project drifting around Antarctica. But, despite his rich career, the search for funding remains a fight. Meeting.
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“To make a bird’s portrait, first paint a cage with an open door,” wrote Jacques Prévert. To make an explorer, let’s start by sketching an office, with a door or rather a window on the port of Concarneau, in Finistère. March 28, Jean-Louis Etienne is on the premises of the Naval Builder Piriou for a meeting of perseverance design. This 42 meter schooner, designed by the Naval Architects of VPLP and Olivier Small, will be the Polar Pod’s avite boat, his next expedition. His “cathedral”, as he nicknamed this vertical ship project, which occupied it for more than ten years. From 2024, the Polar Pod must perform two world towers over three years by deriving around Antarctica, serving an ambitious scientific mission.
Around the table – and, for a few, in Visio – the discussion is hypertechnic, covering the sails, stairs … of perseverance. The adventurer and 75-year-old doctor takes the floor to clarify his needs, ask concrete questions, give his opinion. A few meters away, his wife, Elsa Penny-Etienne, accompanied by his projects for twenty-five years and involved in the inner architecture of the sailboat, is plunged into color charts, to choose interior fittings. Between two refreshments of the Polar Pod in men and equipment, every two months, perseverance will welcome passengers passionate about this ocean exploration. A welcome financial resource, in addition to the partners, to amortize the costs of the vessel, owned by Seventh continent, the shipowners company of Jean-Louis Etienne (the construction of the Polar Pod is, it, financed by the State, with the ‘French research institute for the exploitation of the sea, the Ifremer, as a client).
Cap of milling machine
For whom it was crisscrossed, land and even tunes, depending on the eras, such a construction meeting could appear a strand austere. “I like these moments of technology, it structures and I find it my place”, does it deny, during a second meeting in a more personal place: its “office refuge” Parisian, high floor, where He works up to twelve hours a day, and remains to sleep. There is a myriad of photos and souvenir objects of his expeditions and other slices of life, a keyboard on which he plays blues in self-taught, the guitar he had made at the age of 15 …
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