Born on 8 November 1952 in Bézu-Saint-Germain (Aisne), Guy Delage was drawn early to swimming, the sea and sailing. In 1975 he made his first Atlantic crossing under sail as skipper.
In 1978 he designed and helped build the 12-metre monohull Salamandre for the Route du Rhum, finishing second among boats under 12 m and ninth overall.
He then built several proas: Funambule (1980, winner of the multihull trophy in 1981), Rosières (capsized at the start of the 1982 Route du Rhum) and Montpellier-Languedoc-Roussillon (dismasted twice in 1984-1985, project abandoned).
He crossed the Atlantic in a microlight aircraft in 1991, then from Cape Verde to Barbados swimming and drifting between 16 December 1994 and 9 February 1995. In 1998 his attempt to cross the Indian Ocean on a drifting raft ended when the underwater habitat sank. He later built the catamaran Itzamma (1998) and the ecological sailboat Dagda (completed 2013), wrecked in Polynesia in August 2015.
