After spending most of his life on commercial vessels, Guillaume Picard is now fighting to keep these vast liners out of the French port of Marseille

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.”