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“Gooooool!!! Gol! Gol! Gol!” yelled a man, waking me up from my siesta. I looked over to where the yelling came from and saw a group of tanned shirtless men sitting around a portable radio, attentively listening to the football match commentary. We were all under a wooden shed, on a small beach, surrounded only by rocks and sea. “Where am I?” I thought to myself, “Have I woken up to a dream?” One usually wakes up from a dream, but this definitely felt like waking up to one. I suddenly felt the pain on my back from the hammock’s net, which had been penetrating my naked skin during my sleep, and I slowly regained my senses. “Oh yeah, I’m on an island close to Taganga, with Jose, Karina, and their fishing crew, doing a documentary on them with my friend Eduardo,” I recollected. Even with my senses regained, I still felt like I was in a dream. Neither of us had ever done a documentary before, and just two weeks into our Colombian trip, we were somehow making it happen with nothing but two iPhones and a Gopro camera. “Taganga, in the indigenous dialect, means woman that bears many children. The place was named so by our ancestors after the abundance of fish in its shore,” Erasmo, Karina’s brother, later informed me. It’s in the fishing village of Taganga, on the northern coast of Colombia, where Jose and Karina live and where we first met them. They were the very reason we went there. About a week before waking up from my siesta on the island, my friend and I met Jeyson and Carla, a young Colombian couple whom had been housed by Jose and Karina for a few days. Upon hearing our aspiration to do a documentary, they told us about Jose “The Monkey” Pita – the leader of a fishing squad; Karina Guaray – the first ever fisherwoman of Taganga; and the other chinchorreros – the fishermen who use the indigenous chinchorro (dragging net) fishing technique. If we were ever to encounter a story worth documenting during our trip, theirs was it. We took a six-hour bus ride to the village and, once there, it wasn’t long before a local guided us to their house. When we got there, a large lady was stoically standing at the front door. “Karina?” I asked. “Yes,’” she replied. At that moment I realized we hadn’t planned what to say, and that if we were to spend entire days filming them, we probably should have prepared our approach. Thus, I was simply as direct as possible: “I’m Marcos and this is Eduardo. We’re travelers from Portugal and we met Jeyson and Carla a couple of days ago, who told us about their time with you and Jose. We were very interested in their stories about you and the way you fish, and we were wondering if we could get to know each other and, perhaps, do a documentary about you.” She looked at me with some suspicion at first, and I felt somewhat uncomfortable and naive asking her this - one does not simply go over to strangers and ask them if it’s okay to do a documentary about them. However, we proceeded to talk, and by the end of that very first conversation she sang us a song she’d created about a day in the life of a chinchorrero. My hair stood on end as I heard her sing, above all out of awe for her openness. We were just two strangers to her, two gringos, and right at the first encounter she was so incredibly personal. I realize now, upon writing these words, that her openness with us must have been, at least in part, a reaction to our openness in approaching her. In fact, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the whole experience is that being interested in others and bold about your aspirations will get you to connect with incredible people and ultimately achieve your aspirations. At 4 am next morning we had Jose knocking at our door, making sure we were ready to set off with them to one of the fishing islands.