Hervé SOURISSEAU

Senior Hydrographic surveyor / Professional drone pilot

The atypical

Someone can have an atypical profile but still be an obvious choice for a company.

Hervé Sourisseau didn’t follow a traditional curriculum to join ABYSSA, but his curiosity, his ingenuity and persistence have enabled him to become a key hydrographic technician for the company.

Hervé Sourisseau was born in Germany and grew up between La Rochelle and the Oléron island, where he spent many summers with his grandparents. There, Hervé discovered maritime activities such as bodyboarding and fishing. He took his lifeguard diploma and spent two summers guarding the local beaches.

But in his family, careers in the sea were not a well-known option, and no-one suggested it to him. So he took a technical diploma in industrial mechanics and joined the food industry as a maintenance technician. It was an interesting job, but the staggered working hours soon became a burden: working at night had a major impact on his social life and left a bitter taste in his mouth.

So he embarked on the trip of a lifetime with his uncle, across Africa. The road trip took him as far as Burkina Faso, via Morocco, Mauritania and Mali. The road being particularly conducive to reflection, Hervé realises that his life no longer suits him. That he couldn’t contemplate ending his life cooped up in a factory. So he decided to join Créocéan.

Even though he was starting from scratch professionally, his curiosity, his taste for learning, his rigour and his ‘handyman’ profile worked wonders. Over the years, Hervé has worked in every field, from benthic inventories to fishing missions, from ADCP installation to geophysics. He has taken part in numerous missions around the world, from Yemen to Gabon, via Haiti, Angola and the Comoros Islands, as well as Cuba, the French overseas departments and territories, and so on.

When ABYSSA was set up, Hervé was blown away, as much by the company’s mission as by its ambitions and innovative concept. So when he was offered a job as a senior technician in the company, Hervé accepted and, at the same time, enrolled in a training course to become an AUV 6000 operator, a further asset for ABYSSA’s development.