Tamara Klink crosses the Arctic Circle – 09/26/2023 – Sport

Instead of designing houses and buildings, architect Tamara Klink, 26, decided to take a more difficult and dangerous path. She became the first Brazilian woman and the country’s youngest navigator to cross the Arctic Circle on a solo journey, following in the footsteps of her father, adventurer Amyr Klink, 68.

For two months in the company of fish and birds, surrounded by icebergs, she traveled 2500 miles between Camaret sur Mer, in France, and Aasiaat, in Greenland, aboard a small steel sailboat Sardinha 2, 10.5 meters long. , prepared for the trip on a French base over the course of a year. Tamara travels without internet access, exchanging emails via satellite was restricted to the technical team.

It was yet another challenge overcome by the young woman, who has been carrying out one challenging mission a year in recent times. Straight from Greenland, she says she started planning this trip when she was 13 years old and was in Antarctica with her parents and sisters.

“I thought about it at that time and now, at 26 years old, 13 years later, I managed to achieve my goal,” he says. Overcoming the imaginary Arctic line is Tamara’s fourth solo trip. Prior to this adventure, she crossed 1000 miles of the North Sea between Norway and France in 2020, crossed 4000 miles of the Atlantic between France and Brazil in 2021, and traveled 2000 miles along the Brazilian coast from Paraty to Recife last year. past.

“Traveling alone makes me do my best. I know that if I don’t adjust the sail or check the anchor chain, no one will do it for me”, she says. “It’s an exercise in which I’m always finding new energy, stimuli and for a woman this is very motivating.”

Preparing for the trip was not simple. The budget was limited and throughout the project many things went according to plan. Its objective was to start the journey in May, but there were delays in installing the vessel’s electrical part, in addition to unforeseen administrative and professional problems that helped it.

“I ended up traveling five months later than I intended, I only left France in the middle of summer, which ended up making sailing different from what I expected”, he says.

Tamara missed, for example, the periods in Greenland when the sun shines for 24 hours and, when she arrived, the night had already lasted four hours and gained 20 minutes daily. The positive part was that at the end of the season there were fewer icebergs in the way. “I turned inconveniences into advantages and adjusted my route to overcome obstacles,” she explains.

“To make up for lost time, I decided to cut many stops along the way, doing much longer stretches of navigation”, he adds.

According to the adventurer, the path to the polar circle is a high-risk navigation because it passes through regions where there are dangers all the time. There are large and small icebergs that sometimes don’t appear on radar and can appear suddenly. She received daily reports on the position of the ice floes to ensure her safety.

Furthermore, she explains that nautical charts in Greenland are very inaccurate, made over a hundred years ago, with many places uncharted. “There are few places here to make repairs if there is an accident or an engine problem in the middle of the sea,” she says.

Tamara reports some difficult moments. She says that at least once a day, in her diary, she wrote that she was very scared. Anchoring, for example, was always a tense moment due to the lack of accurate bottom charts and constant exhaustion.

She considers that fear is part of the process and she tries to use it as an ally. She says that it is fear that makes her wake up when she rings the alarm clock every 20 minutes to look around, and it is also what makes her check if the anchor is securely attached to the bottom. “It’s fear that wakes me up if I hear a strange noise.”

She considers, however, that the most decisive part of the project was the preparation, which can be tiring and discouraging. “When the preparation became difficult, it seemed like the boat wouldn’t be ready, I felt tempted to leave everything behind and give up,” she recalls. “But I was sure that if I gave up I would lose everything I invested and my sponsors.” It is sponsored by Magalu and NTT Data.

Tamara began choosing a boat for the trip to the Arctic in 2022, as soon as she finished writing her book, “We: the Atlantic in Solitariness” (Companhia das Letras), published in July 2023, in which she narrates the trip across the Arctic. Atlântico on the eight-meter boat Sardinha 1, at the age of 24, and tells how she became the youngest Brazilian navigator to achieve the feat.

“For the Arctic, I looked for aluminum or steel boats, but the aluminum one I wanted was way beyond my budget,” he says. “I ended up buying a steel boat in France and preparing it for the polar regions, which took longer than I expected.”

About her father, she says that besides being a great inspiration, he is a reference for her travels. Tamara remembers that Amyr Klink went to the Arctic more than 30 years ago, in a pre-internet time, without the communication equipment that exists today, without the navigation technology currently available and with paper charts.

“I feel privileged to have been born in modern times because, in my father’s time, a woman sailing alone in these regions was even more distant than it is today”, she states. “I want to change the idea of ​​what a woman is capable of.”

In Greenland, Tâmara has been amazed daily. On the day of this interview, she spoke about the beauty of the place. She woke up in the morning, looked at the sea and saw that on the surface of the water there was a thin layer of ice.

“It’s incredible to see the transformations of the seasons becoming concrete and to zigzag in the middle of the tabular icebergs, these icebergs that come from glaciers, float long distances and are gigantic, bigger than blocks, bigger than airports”, he says. “Icebergs seem immobile and from one day to the next they change shape, color, tilt, lose pieces. Watching them is fascinating and addictive.”

Contemplating the beauty of nature, Tamara completed another solitary trip.