Spending between eight and fifteen days alone in the Mediterranean Sea, swimming eight hours a day, that’s life waiting Remi Camus from June 7 or 8. As long as it takes, the adventurous explorer is going to be stuck, for this 180 km crossing between Calvi and Monaco, with a 180 kg platform that he is going to tow himself. A monumental sporting challenge, in total autonomy and without assistance, that this 37-year-old Rhodanian has been preparing for since 2020. This swimming crossing should have taken place in September 2022, but it had been postponed, ten days before the big departure, due to a logistical problem. “It took me time to accept the failure, confides Rémi Camus. I took two months to breathe and put my head back in order to bounce back. After the setback of last year, being at the start will already be a successful project. Afterwards, it’s adventure…”
And Alba’s young dad (10 months) will be served from that side, in water around 15°C. Dependent to the highest degree on sea currents and the weather, his challenge was designed as precisely as possible. “The idea is to do the three eights like in a company, smiles the adventurer who lives in Villefranche-sur-Saône. I plan to swim between 8 and 12 hours, then between 2 and 6 pm, in order to cover 15 to 20 km per day. The rest of the time, I’m on the platform to rest, take my freeze-dried meals and desalinate seawater with a pump so I can drink it. »
The click thanks to Jamel Balhi
It is on this platform of 3 m by 1.80 m, built on a catamaran base and equipped with a solar panel, that Rémi Camus will also shoot images, since a film is planned on this unprecedented sea project. . The taste for crazy adventures is obviously not new for this former butler in a starred restaurant near Geneva. “I’ve always wanted to meet people in a way other than that of the ordinary tourist circuits”, sums up the latter, who keeps in mind “treks for the sick in New Zealand”.
He just needed a click, and this one came reading In the heart of the Americas by Jamel Balhi. Namely the story of a Lyonnais who crossed America running from north to south (24,000 km in total). A story as a real source of inspiration for Rémi Camus, who organized an incredible trip to Australia for a year in 2011. With his trailer attached to a harness, he ran across the whole country, or 5,400 km in a hundred days, twenty-five of which he insisted on spending alongside the aborigines. “It was an adventure to discover my limits,” he recalls. I never imagined that there could be such remote places in the world, at 50°C and 700 km from the first city. »
“The gugusse in hydrospeed” on the Mekong
Rémi Camus returns from this journey “marked” by a problem. “The quest for water is the absolute priority in such a hostile universe,” he explains. It freaks me out and after four days in the desert without drinking there, I ended up drinking my urine so as not to die. I understood how much people had to fight all their lives to have access to water. This is how water will become the red thread of his adventures, starting with his descent of the Mekong River in hydrospeed, from Tibet to Vietnam (4,400 km), for five months in 2013.
I didn’t think a river in the world could be so polluted. This crazy amount of waste raised questions in me. But the way of life there is so different from ours. And when your concern is to survive, the environment naturally takes second place. »
Faced with a population that most often does not speak a word of English, Rémi Camus keeps in mind immense social difficulties in this challenge. “I found myself drawing at the Eiffel Tower on the ground to make people understand where I came from,” he smiles. The local populations were hallucinating to see a guy coming out of the water in hydrospeed. The language barrier took an energy out of me. Even more so than the 16 hours a day of palming in Asia. A project that will also soon be brought to the screen, in order to show the impact it had on the adventurer, ten years later.
The boost of the program “Wild” on M6
Publicized and more “professionalized” because of his participation in the program “Wild” (on M6) which he won in 2018, Rémi Camus immediately completed the first swimming tour of France, from Dunkirk to Monaco. That is 2,650 km in three and a half months, and the environmental problem of pollution at sea is then imposed on him. “In 2018, it was not yet a news really highlighted in the media, he explains. I was able to see how very, very dirty our coasts were”, like the open dump at Dollemard, in Le Havre.
“When I arrived in Monaco, I even realized that the Mediterranean Sea was a real trash can. This is how the Calvi-Monaco project was born, to make as many people as possible aware of the degradation of our environment. “A theme on which Rémi Camus was able to discuss… with Albert of Monaco, who wanted to receive him in his princely palace at the end of his swimming tour of France.
He starts his days by entering a freezer
During these three and a half months, the adventurer took the opportunity to meet children and pick up trash with them on the beaches. Raising awareness among the younger generations, which he continues, by intervening in schools in the Lyon region. In his “human adventure” Calvi-Monaco, Rémi Camus is accompanied (from a distance) by two videographers, aboard a sailboat, with which he will not communicate at all during the crossing. “We are going into the unknown, I don’t know how my body will react being immersed for more than a week”, slips the adventurer, who has prepared by swimming very often in the Saôneand entering every morning for about fifteen minutes… in a freezer at 0°C!
The Caladois will take advantage of his challenge to provide data to the Grenoble University Hospital, curious to assess the consequences on the human body of this dive “in such an anxiety-provoking environment”, with all the stress that this can cause him. He will therefore perform daily saliva tests, as well as air and water quality control analyzes that he will provide to the Wessling laboratory.
A complete sporting challenge, which “could make people want to surpass themselves”, while serving “the cause of the preservation of the seas and oceans”, as Rémi Camus holds. With the part of the unknown that makes the salt of the project: “I expect to live my hardest adventure so far. It’s so challenging to always have to be alone at sea. It’s the first time I won’t have any landmarks in space, which is destabilizing. » A soft euphemism to qualify this aquatic challenge of 180 km by constantly towing the weight of a bear.