BACKGROUND
My father, who is a sailor, an adventurer and doctor, taught me how to spearfish, to windsurf on flat water, and to maintain boats as a young girl. Along with my mom and my two younger brothers, I was fortunate enough to grow up in and around the water inside the barrier reef of New Caledonia. I fell in love with the ocean and at 15 years windsurfed on my first wave, from then I knew without a doubt that my whole life would be about surfing. I’ve always had a taste for adrenaline, even when I was a little girl. I would always climb up trees and jump off cliffs. I guess music could be the ‘yang’ of the adrenaline ‘ying’ seeking side of me. Right now I have a guitar and a ukulele. I love music! In French we say “la musique adoucit les moeurs”, which loosely means “music soothes the mind” and I believe it’s very true. A lot of my tenacity comes from being a musician. 12 years of classical piano at the New Caledonia Conservatory of Music made me a dedicated hard worker. Writing and performing my own songs and playing acoustic and electric guitar in bands through school and university introduced me to the joy of sharing a message with an audience. I am an engineer; I studied my first two years in New Caledonia and the last three in France. It started as engineering in general but then I became more specialized into applied mathematics and computer science. After that I studied imagery analysis and did my first internship on satellite images of mangroves. I built an algorithm that would differentiate the various species of mangroves and what would happen to the plants over time. Then I worked more withfisheries and tuna stocks, which involved a lot of statistics! Most of the projects I worked on were connected to the environment. I like anything to do with the environment and how to protect it. Above all else I am a surfer. I can’t live without the feeling I get from riding waves, and the healthy and positive lifestyle being able to accomplish these dreams requires. After being all these different things, my goal now, my hope, is to inspire others to keep pushing down their own path as well.