Welcome on board!
Tiny little boat going down to the river mouth...
Thanks for joining this trip. This is my boat: it is tiny, humble, free, with no water leak, and bringing stories that I always wanted to gather in one place. But, to be honest with you, there are some stories and specific things I just don’t want to forget. The main idea behind this channel is to reduce the distance between people as I think a CV or the number of publications you have does not show exactly who you are or what you are capable of doing. In this way, nothing is better than spending time together on the boat (or on an island) to get to know someone else. I don’t really know which path I am going to follow afterwards as academia is always a question mark, but I am sure about everything I like to do and also what I want to be doing in the next few years. I feel like I was always following a way to reach this point, as if everything was exactly calculated, which is fun because nothing that happened in my life was planned. I actually always followed what I thought to be the right thing combined with what most call my attention and respect: the ocean. In other words, a biased decision tree. If for some reason I headed to land, it was because that place and time would be the right place and time to answer my questions. Otherwise, I can only see my life close to the ocean and living the currents, swells and winds.
I love analogies because, for me, a good one is a piece of art in terms of transfer learning and education (obviously it came from good teachers and professors I had during my journey). Maybe I am preparing the terrain for what is to come. But the thing is that I realized how similar this momentum I am living now is related to some aspects of the daily-life of fishermen, mainly when they reach the ocean after navigating along the river. A fisherman I met during a trip aboard a longline fishing boat in Rio Grande, Brazil, told me that the distance between the harbor and the river mouth in some cities in northern Brazil is so big that it takes three days to get to the ocean and start the ‘real’ journey to offshore waters. Can you imagine what they think when they reach the ocean? He told me this story (fact) while I was impressed that we were about an hour from the harbor and hadn't reached the ocean yet. Sometimes I feel like I spent a lot of time driving my boat along a messy big river and now I am about to navigate in open waters.
Most of the inspiration here came from the experience onboard artisanal fishing boats in southern Brazil, where I had the privilege to listen to their stories and live some of the situations they told me. But it is also interesting to compare those perspectives to other groups of people that also depend on the ocean such as the navy, which I also had the opportunity to experience while living in a research base at Trindade Island (Brazil); researchers during scientific expeditions; and in the industry. Each person has a story behind their eyes with so much knowledge of the world. A passive, portable data source defined by blinks and stored as narratives. I have a great interest in listening to stories from fishermen, mainly, because those might represent the raw perspective of the ocean by the human being. There is so much knowledge and expression in a sentence like: ‘The ocean is a living thing’, from Mestre Amauri (Tramandaí-RS, Brazil), which said that steering my eyes very serious after I said that many seabirds were ‘having shower’ in the glassy water. Storm. I can imagine what tough moments this master has lived in the sea to interpret waves and winds as a living thing. A complex understanding that highlights the ocean as a unit that, together with the animals and plants (algae), represents a bigger thing. Most of the people in big cities forget that, moving them out of this sustainable and natural system, likely living as invasive parasites (sorry too much).
Here, I am bringing together scientific content, photography and literature as a way to express myself, but also because I think it can contribute to reducing the distance between people and nature. I love science and I know why it should be rigid, but I feel I need to do more and that’s what it is all about. I don’t want to be just one thing in my life (not adaptive as well), and the world we live today requires an interdisciplinary competence. For now, I can only say I am enjoying the waves crashing the bow but always wondering what is happening from the backline onwards.