Tamara Klink, with sparkling eyes and a generous spirit, is one of those people who take us along with on their journey, and inspire us to awaken our childhood dreams.
In 2024, Tamara Klink, a 27-year-old Brazilian sailor, drops anchor in a deserted Greenland fjord, voluntarily “imprisoned” in the ice for the eight months of a daring wintering, alone in the middle of the Arctic. A dreamlike adventure that redraws the boundaries of what is possible, and whose uniqueness lies as much in the journey as in the quest.
The travel tales of her father, the famous navigator Amyr Klink, lulled young Tamara to sleep. The icy silence and polar bears that reigned there nurtured her dreams of tomorrow.
When her father took her on board, she discovered the Arctic and her imagination met reality. “It was as if I’d discovered that magic really did exist. Back home, I couldn’t live a normal life knowing that this place was real.” Later, it was her turn to set off on her own.
She learned French “above all to read the navigation books, most of which were written in the language of Molière”. After studying naval architecture in Nantes, she settled in Lorient: “Being around people for whom this way of life was normal inspired me. A bit like someone who dreams of being in the mountains and settles in Chamonix”. In Norway, she bought her first boat for the price of a bicycle, which her grandmother named Sardinhia 1, and made her first solo Transatlantic crossing. “The craziest thing about all this wasn’t that I was the youngest person to have sailed in the Arctic, it was that I did it with a weekend boat, not at all made for that!”
One book and several conferences later, her dream of returning to the ice never left her. She bought a second boat, Sardinhia 2, and embarked on the preparation of this rather crazy project: an 8-month wintering, alone, in the Arctic, surrounded by ice. “Anyone who’s seen Titanic knows: sailing among icebergs is a challenge”. In the Arctic, we face the unknown: obsolete nautical charts, uncharted seabeds, and the omnipresent threat of polar bears. It’s also a technical challenge: for this, Millet accompanies her with equipment designed for polar latitudes, notably its MXP range. She had to think of everything, “right down to the number of tubes of toothpaste!” Nothing superfluous in her luggage. She slipped in the books Into the wild by Jon Krakauer and Les femmes aussi sont du voyage by Lucie Azéma.
The boat is ready, Tamara is ready: it’s time to leave.
At first, she comes up against a few Greenlanders who take a dim view of the arrival of Europeans, who often reduce them to folklore, a stereotype mythologized by colonial history. But they also share the same fears as those around her: spending eight months alone on the ice floe is not serious. For them, Tamara is too thin, too Brazilian, too… womanly. The Arctic has always been a man’s terrain, “women were thought to bring bad luck on boats”. Suffering was romanticized, virility was praised. Today, women are writing their own stories, and Tamara is “more afraid of men than polar bears”.
Tamara finds her place, moves “in time and not in space”, and “being just happy to be there”. She discovers a previously unknown rhythm and finds refuge in her solitude. When the thaw came, Tamara withdrew, strengthened by the journey that had changed her forever.
Although she was said to be “imprisoned” by the ice, Tamara experienced unparalleled freedom. She found happiness on the ice floe, despite the dangers. An ice pack that she will continue to defend in 2025, the year of the glaciers, so threatened is it by climate change. And if you listen to Tamara, you can bet she’ll still be answering the call of the ice.
Tamara ‘s selection
Source : https://www.millet.com/eu_en/blog/tamara-klink-8-month-by-the-ice
