Fátima Ricardo

Breaking of the Dawn.
The name wasn’t chosen by her, but it couldn’t be more fitting. “The first boat we bought already had this name,” says Fátima Ricardo, a fisherwoman “for about 40 years.” “Basically, my whole life. I even worked in the rice fields for a while, but back then you earned more at sea.”

That’s no longer quite the case, she laments. She has never worked anywhere other than the Palafitic Pier of Carrasqueira, in Comporta. There used to be many more people there; “now, maybe not even 20.” “I notice a huge difference. It has nothing to do with the past, there are no new generations,” she points out, explaining that “fishing no longer pays off.” “It’s a life of very hard work. People prefer a job with holidays and weekends, those kinds of things. We have none of that.”

There’s also less fish, she warns. “Much less. There used to be many more of us and there was fish for everyone. Today there’s little fish, but a lot of demand,” Fátima assures. And that’s why she and her husband still head out to sea every dawn. “We always go together. Our tasks are well defined. When you get to the boat, there’s a way of working in which each person knows exactly what they have to do,” she says. He handles the engine, she works the bow. “I cast the nets and he hauls them in. I take the fish out. We never get in each other’s way,” she guarantees, laughing as she recalls that arguments only happen on days of poor catches. “When the fishing goes well, we all come back happy.”

Fátima’s life, like everyone else’s there, is measured by the tides. “In our harbour, there isn’t always water,” she explains. Either way, “we never fish very late,” never after six in the morning, she assures.

Cuttlefish are their main livelihood, “from February until the end of July,” but the routine adapts to the seasons. “Then come other fisheries: sea bass, gilthead bream, worms, clams. We complement with other things,” explains the fisherwoman, who proudly became Ocean Alive’s first Guardian of the Sea “Raquel Gaspar met me. She was enchanted and started coming to my house and inviting me to join the project,” she recalls. It wasn’t hard to convince her. “If she, who didn’t live this life, loved it so much and wanted to remove rubbish and help with certain things, how could we,  who lived from this, whose livelihood it was, not do the same?”

The mission began with simple gestures: collecting the rubbish that came up in the nets and looking at their source of livelihood in a different way. “In the past, we thought the river was so big it could absorb everything. Whatever we took with us, we threw away. Water bottles, bags, yoghurt cups, everything.” Today, whatever comes up in the nets goes back in rubbish bags. “Everything we take, we bring back,” she says proudly, convinced that “everyone now looks at the estuary differently.” “It opened up our horizons.”

Fátima sells her catch to intermediaries, such as Ismael Nunes, in Carrasqueira.