In 1931 Simone Weil, during a stay in Normandy, boarded with a family of fishermen, Lecarpentier, to practice fishing and continue to know the reality of manual work. A few years later, in a small town in Portugal, she had her first intense encounter with Christianity, while she was listening to the ancient songs of the fishermen’s wives. Photographing the life on the boat of the fishermen of Honfleur and Trouville, I’ve understood how much fishing, like few other human activities, manages to combine the spiritual and manual aspect of work. Norman fishermen often stay days in the sea. From October to March they fish for saint jacques shells, from April to September, after a period of maintenance of the boats, they look for fish. The life on Normandy fishing boats looks as a theater show, the nets and the metal cables are the backdrop. Every single gesture of the fishermen moves to the rhythm of the wind’s blow and has a very specific meaning. The strength of their actions creates an ancestral ritual. Sometimes it is a ritual of a hard, tiring but honest struggle, other times it is a ritual of contemplation that is still capable of speaking with respect to nature. The deep abysses preserve treasures and hide tragedies. The fishermen’s proud and full of dedication looks scan the horizon and try to steal the signals of the waves that, as oracles, guide the action. The fishing on the Normandy coasts has been handed down for centuries from generation to generation. Today there are several factors that test the love and the obsession of fishermen for this work: the spread of industrial fishing, the increase of the price of the fuel, the problems related to Brexit, the project to build wind turbines where there are fishing routes. Around fishing lives a community that shares joys and sorrows, expectations and efforts, farewells and reunions, but above all the same unique experience of spending the existence at sea, welcoming the sunrise and the falling of the night.