At the tip of Brittany’s wild, wet Côtes-d’Armor peninsula is the village of Plougrescant. Beyond that, butting right out into the sea, lies Yvinec island, a tiny outcrop intermittently accessible depending on tides via a rock-studded expanse of dunes and seaweed. To get there I have taken two planes, a train and a puzzling automobile. It has been an epic journey, but I can’t possibly say that to Guirec Soudée when he picks me up for the last leg in his 4x4. I may have got lost in a Brest industrial estate at midnight, unable to make the hire car headlights work, but the 26-year-old Breton sailed around the world solo for five years. During that time he was trapped in Arctic ice for 130 days, survived 15m waves, nearly capsized repeatedly, was imprisoned briefly by Canadian coastguards and became the youngest sailor to navigate the formidable Northwest Passage between the Pacific and the Atlantic solo. Well, I say solo. Sole human. He was accompanied by a chicken, a Rhode Island Red named Monique.
From January 2014 to their return to Brittany in December 2018, the pair covered 45,000 miles. They crossed the Atlantic, travelled to the North and South Poles, across to Cape Horn, back to the Caribbean and home, punctuated by stops to repair the boat, wait out the weather, or earn money. Every adventure, encounter and disaster (there were plenty of all three) was recorded in jaw-dropping pictures and funny videos on their increasingly popular social media accounts (they now have 125k Facebook and 42.8k Instagram followers).
That was where I discovered – and fell hard for – the pair. A handsome, fresh-faced young adventurer and his stoic brown hen on their plucky little boat felt like a gift: an uncomplicated shot of sunshine in a dark time. Their story is an internet-age Boy’s Own adventure: Guirec paddleboarded through icebergs, met polar bears, caught huge fish and even saved a drowning poodle.
Meanwhile Monique shared his breakfast (and, indeed, his paddleboard), bewitched Inuit kids who had never seen a hen, and perched on deck, contemplating the vastness of various oceans. No surprise then, to learn that their children’s book, The Hen Who Sailed Around the World, has already been published.
Guirec (sans Monique) meets me in Plougrescant’s car park – a slight, garrulous and smiley figure in a big jumper – and we head off at a slow trundle across the bay to Yvinec. It is a private island (acquired cheaply after the war by the Soudée family), current population four. In addition to Guirec and Monique, there’s Bosco the dog, a rangy part-husky giant who waits on the headland to greet us. (“I got him in Alaska: I swapped him for a chainsaw.”) Girlfriend Lauren, who met Guirec through his Facebook page, is the fourth, part-time resident, helping out with his increasingly time-consuming social media commitments and public engagements. Guirec: “You’re sort of Breton now though, aren’t you?” Lauren (firmly): “No, I’m Parisienne.”
They share the handsome stone farmhouse in which Guirec grew up, a dreamy place with cornflower-blue doors and shutters and huge open fires. The sea is everywhere: we take a tour, clambering up the rocks so Guirec can point out the inlets, coves and best crabbing spots of his stretch of windswept coast. If ever a place were perfectly designed to raise an ocean-going adventurer, it’s here. His was a wild childhood: the youngest of eight siblings raised by an indulgent father, he was largely left to amuse himself. “I spent more time on water than on land. I got my first boat at seven and even before that, I would go out to sea to drop off my lobster pots and catch fish. This island made me.”
Sea always won over school: Guirec went to 13 in total, leaving with no qualifications, but a nagging desire for adventure. “When I turned 18, I could have got a job, but I wanted to travel. I wanted to go far away.” His father, Stany, had crossed the Atlantic twice. Guirec grew up on those stories, poring over pictures in old photo albums. He headed to Australia, but this was no gap year frolic. Penniless, he slept in the streets at first, worked as a fruit picker and shrimp fisherman, captaining hard-drinking sailors twice his age until he earned enough to buy his own boat on his return to Brittany and set sail.
His initial goal was modest enough: to cross the Atlantic, solo. He had no idea the trip would last five years, though even at the start he hoped to go further. “I already had an idea of heading to the ice,” he says. “In my head I dreamed of going around the world – who doesn’t?” (Me, I think loudly, though I nod in agreement.) “But I had no idea what I was getting into, I knew nothing about sailing.”
The boat he bought, an 11.7m craft more than 10 years older than Guirec himself, turned out to be a corroded disaster he was strongly advised by more experienced sailors not to take to sea. On top of that, Guirec had never sailed a boat of that size. Undaunted, he patched the holes and called it Yvinec, in honour of the island. “I practised for a couple of hours around here, then I left.” Aged 21, without a clear itinerary, any money or even a functioning radio. What about his family, I ask, appalled. “My parents asked what would happen if something went wrong. I told them it would be fine, I had a phone and a beacon, which was totally untrue.”
Monique joined the crew on an early stop in Tenerife. “I knew I wanted to sail alone, for sure, but I wanted a pet. I thought a chicken would be brilliant, because I could have fresh eggs at sea.” He had absolutely no experience of keeping chickens and was warned that a hen at sea would be too stressed to lay, but (a theme may be emerging) he persisted. Monique was presented to him in a cardboard box by a friend before he set off to cross the Atlantic. She was named after a personalised Breton breakfast bowl left in the boat by a previous owner. “That way we both had our own bowls.” It was something of a gamble. “Honestly, I didn’t think she’d get to the other side, she’d fall in or something.” Guirec built an on-deck coop to keep Monique safe when waves threatened to sweep her overboard, and another in the cabin, where she slept, laid eggs and stayed safe, warm and dry, even in the worst weather. Defying the experts, Monique laid an egg on her first day aboard. Gradually the pair adjusted to life à deux.
“I said to myself: ‘If she annoys me, I can always eat her.’ It feels weird to say that now! We formed a real bond. She was so endearing, she made me laugh so much, it felt as if I had always known her.” Seemingly imperturbable, she enjoyed the run of the deck (when seas were very rough she would roam the cabin), dodging waves, pouncing on flying fish that landed on deck and stealing the bream and tuna Guirec caught to complement her diet of grain, dried insects and table scraps. “She loves fish,” he says. “It gave her eggs a salty taste.”
On long stops, Guirec brought her off the boat with him to eat grass and scratch around in sand or pebbles. As a long-time chicken owner and lover myself, it seems an odd, but not a bad life for a hen, apart from the solitude: most chickens I know are deeply social creatures. Monique seems to have accepted Guirec as her flock. They were always together, rarely spending a night apart. “I didn’t want to. Sometimes it was a bit tricky, I couldn’t always do everything I wanted, but I was happy to share it all with Monique.”
Of course, taking a hen on a round-the-world trip could be a cynically brilliant ploy to create a USP in the crowded, and crowdfunded, field of contemporary adventuring, but the affection with which Guirec talks about Monique (or Momo as he calls her) sweeps away any scepticism. I love the guileless way he says “us” whenever he’s discussing their adventures – not a royal we, but a man-plus-chicken we. “Once we’d crossed the Atlantic we said to ourselves: ‘We enjoyed that, we can go further.’”
Their best experience – though it sounds nightmarish – was the four months spent wintering in Greenland in 2015-16, voluntarily frozen into the polar ice. It was a childhood dream, but with wind chill, the temperatures dropped to -60°C, and the boat was almost destroyed by assaults from huge icebergs and compression between waves of unstable ice. Several times they nearly had to abandon ship. “I didn’t really think I would die, but I thought I would lose everything I had worked for since I was 18. I talked to Monique: she understood, she could tell something was wrong.”
Guirec had chosen not to bring a radio or phone on this phase. “I wanted to be alone with nature, cut off from the world.” A few days into their stay, an Inuit acquaintance came to find him, holding a phone with a message from one of his sisters: their father had died of a heart attack. It was impossible to get back in time for the funeral. “I had just made a video saying, ‘At last, we’re finally here.’ I was buzzing, it was the best day of my life.” He shows me another video of him just after he found out, tears streaming down his face. “My father really looked after me. He did so much for me when I was little. I was so unhappy, but I thought: ‘I’ll transform all this sadness into extra strength.’ I was so proud I got to show him I that I was able to fulfil my ambitions.”
Despite all this, Greenland was “our best experience, our most wonderful memory. We saw the Northern Lights all the time; there were Arctic foxes and caribou. I made Momo a little sledge and we went exploring. She loved it.” She also laid 106 eggs in 130 days, a vital complement to his dwindling rations of rice when fishing proved impossible. “I lost 12kg, honestly she kind of saved my life.”
After Greenland (and an unscheduled 10-day break in France with a perforated appendix, which gave him the chance finally to meet Lauren face-to-face) came the Northwest Passage, an otherworldly place of whales, narwhals and midnight sun. So close to magnetic north the autopilot malfunctioned, Guirec navigated manually for 32 days, barely sleeping. “I had hallucinations. I thought Lauren was on board.” The rest of the journey took in Canada (and that encounter with customs: after some impassioned pleading he was released and allowed to keep Monique), the dangerously stormy 40th and 50th parallels, Antarctica and South Africa, before the slow return to Brittany, dogged by bad weather until the very last day.
How could life back on land be anything other than an anticlimax? How strange must it be, doing interviews and sponsor events after five years of magic, danger and solitude. But Guirec was ready to get home to this warm house, with proper food and a hot shower on his beautiful island. “I was desperate to get home. Everything was really tricky right up until an hour before we got into Paimpol. Then there was the crowd screaming, all my family, loads of boats to welcome us… It was a really special moment.”
He’s also keen to use this time to spread the word about the fragility of the ocean ecosystems he encountered, something that became a bigger part of his mission as the journey continued. The trip has made him vocal about global warming – the Northwest Passage is only navigable now as a result of melting polar ice – and the scourge of plastic waste. On our walk around the island, Guirec detours to pick up every bottle and wrapper we encounter, and he’s in the process of organising a community clean up of the coastline around Plougrescant. “It’s a real problem and so close to my heart. There were times when Monique and I were at sea, when we would turn around just to go and pick up plastic buoys or bottles. Sometimes it took us an hour because we couldn’t get hold of it!”
Inevitably, though, he’s already planning the next adventure: this one wasn’t enough. “I would have liked to do so much more. It went so quickly: it’s horrible how quickly life passes. Monique and I would like to cross the Arctic. There are loads of things we’d like to do, but we’ll see. Honestly, she’s so happy here…”
Where is the famous Monique, first hen to navigate the Northwest Passage? Obviously I insist on a fan meet-and-greet with a top-tier avian influencer, but she has a whole island to roam around. Thankfully, she mainly stays close to Guirec, so I get to feed her mealworms and admire her scratching in the dust. Later she perches on the window ledge watching Lauren prepare lunch and takes a luxuriant dust bath in the afternoon sun. Guirec is building her a henhouse with a sea view; he might get her a few friends.
For a hen who has seen such wonders she seems entirely ordinary, going about her hen business, inscrutable eye busily searching out the next worm. I feel awful asking, but I have to: was it really the same hen all the way? “People ask me that all the time. But if I had lost Monique, I would have been terribly sad and I wouldn’t have got another hen. It would have been completely different. Also there were loads of places I wanted to go and couldn’t because of Monique. I said to myself, ‘Shit, I must really love my hen’.”
The Hen Who Sailed Around the World by Guirec Soudeé is published by Little, Brown at £12.99. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com
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