In Caparica the fishermen are already working when I arrive. The beach smells of salt, and there is the heavy smell of diesel from the tractors that pull the boats up the sand. You hear the sea and the engines at the same time. The boats come in close to the beach, the men jump into the shallow water, and they pull the nets heavy with fish. The fish slide out onto the sand, still moving, still silver and wet. Voices call across the beach, short and direct. Everyone seems to know exactly where to be and what to do.

I stay a little away at first. Camera in my hand, but I don’t use it. I don’t want to push myself into their work. You can feel when you are not part of something yet. I say bom dia, some look and smile, some don’t. I understand they work, I am just a man with a camera.

I come back more days. I watch. I listen. I try to understand the order of things, the rhythm they have. I learn how they move, when they speak, where I can stand so I am not in the way. But I still struggle to make a connection. I am there, close enough to see everything, but far enough to still feel like an outsider.

Sometimes I fear they see me as a tourist. Maybe I am. A tourist to the fishermen. I don’t come here to buy fish or to earn my living from the sea. I come with my camera, and I go back to my home. I come for my mind to escape. To stand by the sea and watch people who live by it. It makes me feel calm. But it also makes me think: am I here for them, or am I here for me?

It’s an ongoing project. I don’t fully know why I’m drawn to it yet. Maybe it’s the discipline of the work, or the way the sea decides everything, no matter what people plan. Maybe it’s the freedom I think I see in them the idea that their lives answer only to tides and weather. Maybe I am romanticising that. But I keep coming back. I want to understand them better, and maybe in that, understand something about myself too.