The 1970s found me keeping distinctly uncivilised hours aboard the sardine boats (blurred image above) out of Portimão, on Portugal's Algarve coast.
My friend Luís's father captained one of the boats and, as the evening sun sank into the Atlantic, we'd slip away from the harbour, often lingering along the shoreline to catch squid before nosing into deeper water where the sardines would be gathering.
The radar belonged in a maritime museum. It possessed all the certainty of a fortune teller after a long lunch, forever dithering over whether the shape below was a glittering shoal of sardines or an inconvenient pile of submerged rocks. Technology, it seemed, had yet to develop a reliable method of distinguishing dinner from disaster.
When the sea declined to surrender its silver harvest, there was never any sense in arguing with it. We danced on the deck to the soul-stirring music of Fado ("fate"), beneath an extravagant canopy of stars, drank rough local wine and occasionally surrendered to an hour's sleep before trying our luck again.
But it was dawn that made those journeys unforgettable. As the first rays of morning light crept above the horizon, we'd turn for home with hungry gulls gathering above our wake.
The sardines were gutted on deck, their entrails tossed skywards to the wheeling birds, who caught their breakfast before it reached the sea. Then we'd lay a few of the fish over a charcoal grill until the skins blistered and crackled, the flesh surrendering its sweet, rich oils.
Breakfast was absurdly simple: freshly grilled sardines, crusty Portuguese papo-secos and a glass of honest red wine. Nothing has since persuaded me that civilisation has improved upon it.
It wasn't merely a meal; it was the sea served on bread, with the dawn poured into a glass.
Graeme & Phylipa Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
