Before sophisticated navigation equipment, before fiberglass hulls, before outboards, a jangada was a simple solution to a specific problem. Northeast Brazil lacked timber heavy enough for proper boat-building, but it had plenty of buoyant balsa and other light woods. Fishermen lashed logs together, stepped a mast, cut a triangular sail from canvas, and had a craft that could cross the shallow shore break without a beach launch, sail upwind on the trade winds, and be dragged up onto the sand at the end of the day without a dock. The design is medieval in its simplicity. It works. The jangadas of Ceará look almost identical to the ones drawn by Dutch artists in the 17th century. The men of Emboaca still fish them.

Older jangadeiros in Emboaca used to sail out 200 kilometers from shore and stay away for a week at a time. No radio. No life jackets. A gourd of water, some farinha, what they could catch. Nowadays the range has dropped - fifty kilometers is the working distance, a day trip, home by evening. The main catches are lobster and camurupim, a large tarpon-like fish prized locally. The old long-range trips produced the village's stock of heroic stories - the fisherman who survived three days on a capsized raft, the father who made it back with his son during a squall. The oral archive in a place like Emboaca is not trivia. It is safety training, told as narrative, passed down because the sea has not become less dangerous.

The worst accidents involved ships the jangadas could not see coming. Oil tankers and cargo ships, running down the Ceará coast toward the ports of Fortaleza and Pecém, generated gigantic bow waves and had no way to spot a wooden raft with no lights in the middle of a dark ocean. Several Emboaca fishermen died over the years from collisions with vessels whose captains never knew they had struck anything. Two things have cut the accident rate: fishermen no longer sail as far from shore, and the rafts now carry battery-powered lights. The danger is not gone. In May 2014, three fishermen from a village near Fortaleza were found adrift for three days before reaching land at Guajiru; one of them had died on the boat. That is the modern story as much as the older one.

Emboaca's infrastructure is a single road running through the middle. Small bars and restaurants line the beach side. The few houses and the church sit on the inland side. There are no buses; if you want to go anywhere, you call a taxi. The vegetation inland is mostly intact - palm trees, banana plants, cashew trees, castanholas, sugar cane, guajiru, mango. Behind the village, the dunes climb steeply and the wind blows hard off the sand. Cows and donkeys wander freely among the rare dune plants. It is a place that has not been discovered by the guidebooks yet, which is probably why it is still what it is - a fishing village that happens to have beautiful water, rather than a beautiful-water resort that happens to have fishermen.