“I then asked for a few months to think about it. Cousteau (who was on the jury in Monaco) said to me: come and spend those months aboard the Calypso with me. We’re off to Haiti. You can make your decision afterwards.”We can imagine why François Sarano turned down the job at the IRD… “Cousteau was an extraordinary man. He used to love to say: here we cut the cloth to suit the man. Ask me what you want and you shall get it.” And that’s how François Sarano spent ten years travelling the world’s oceans and seas with Cousteau and his crew.“It’s difficult to imagine the popularity of Cousteau all over the world. One day in Madagascar, we saw a man coming out of a forest. He came to up to Mr. Cousteau and touched his hand and he said ‘now I can die happy - I’ve met the man who wants to save the planet.’”
With the Cousteau team, François Sarano dived into all the waters of the world. “Scuba diving is a great way of meeting men, animals and environments.” And François Sarano met some extraordinary sea creatures. He swam with Great Whites, admired blue whales, waltzed with jellyfish. “It was another era, another world. Cousteau said to me: ‘François, we’re going to Indonesia’. I would spend two months preparing for the journey with my atlas and encyclopaedia. When I told him that there was one place where the fish were magnificent he said: ‘well what are we waiting for? Let’s go!’” In 1997 when Cousteau died, François Sarano made a promise: the sea, diving and the environment, it’s all over and done with. After so many years under water, he left with his wife for Libya where he wrote a tourist guide and studied paleoanthropology.But how can the sea cope without this man who has done so much to render it precious to other people? And how can he forget his submarine travels? “I was contacted by Deep Ocean Odyssey, an American company that wanted to recreate the Cousteau adventure. They had a 70-metre boat, two divers and unbelievable financing. For two years, I worked on devising the programme for future expeditions and on the day of departure, I received a phone call from the production team saying that I had been fired and that Deep Ocean Odyssey had been dropped.”This time, François Sarano knew that the underwater world had played its last trick on him. But that was before the appearance of Jacques Perrin, the producer of Microcosmos and Peuple Migrateur, who contacted François about his new film: Oceans.“Jacques Perrin has completely changed my way of looking at the ocean. With him, it’s not about discovering the unknown; it’s about discovering what the sea evokes within us.”Founding chairman of the Longitude 181 association, François Sarano loves the sea too much to give it up. And we love the sea too much to give him up!
Photos : François SaranoRendez-vous on the website Longiture 181 Nature
A beautiful slideshow with blue whale
The petrified monsters of Hienghene
Meeting the Bluefin Tuna
Meeting the Jellyfish ...
Meeting the White Shark...