To mark its 80th birthday, the Mútua dos Pescadores challenged Abel Coentrão and Helder Luís to conceive of a work with people inside, to feel the pulse of the sea sector, who asked him from where he came from, which was long and hard walk and if you still have a sea where to follow. This book, we believe, will contribute to a better understanding of the symbolic, economic, social and political weight of the sector in Portugal. And we hope, through it, to value the lives of people and the communities, which are, from the first day, the reason for this cooperative of insurance users founded in 1942.

According to the Greek Diogenes Laércio, when they asked wise Anacársis if the living or the dead would be more numerous, he will have redeemed: “What category do navigators?” If this discussion came out the famous maxim that defined three types of men, the living, the dead and those who walk in the sea – who often appeared to Plato in epigraphs of works on sea themes – is something we do not know. What we know is that the phrase forgets another category of men, in which the authors of this book include: those who live towards the sea. Exit from a trip through the tongue of the tide, this work is a border of chronicles, dialogue between text and photography about some of our maritime communities. And it reflects, from land, about yearnings, concerns, dreams and achievements of men and women we look for, or have found, along the way, that they live in this strange circumstance of deserving the admiration of the living, without among them who They want to imitate. In a “country of sailors” where there are fewer and fewer fishermen, being from the sea has been gaining new contours, which, here and there, we tried to apprehend, but mainly persists as the identity brand of many biographies. We do not know if, as some sources say, Anacársis was the inventor of the two -pointed anchor, but we saw, in this way, how much it holds us to the places where we want to be.