Few people know the sea better than Guillaume Picard. He grew up on a boat moored in the port of Hyères in southern France after his parents left 1960s Paris. His first job was on a sailing boat. Then he spent 30 years in the merchant navy before becoming a commercial captain, ferrying tourists and containers across the Mediterranean for more than two decades.
Now aged 65, his grey hair in a ponytail, it is with no small note of sadness that he says, increasingly, it is the land that calls him. “To be completely honest, I want to go to sea less and less,” he says. “I go hiking a lot in the mountains with my wife, and we’ve found an environment that is much more preserved. The mountains are beautiful wherever you go.”
