Tamara Klink, born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1997, became the first woman to experience the dark and long polar winter of the Arctic, alone. After sailing for 20 days from France to Greenland. But this is not her first great achievement. Despite her young age, she has a repertory that does not appear to be obvious. At the age of 24, in 2021, she became the youngest Brazilian woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean on her sailboat, affectionately nicknamed Sardinha, a boat purchased with her savings and not very suitable for a journey of such size and distance.
In her 27 years of life, graduated in Architecture from ENSA Nantes, in France, she has already published 4 books, transmitting her experiences through her writing, and has become a powerful voice in the environmental and feminine debate. But where does her story begin?
Son of a fish, a little fish it is
Tamara Klink is the daughter of Amyr Klink, considered the first person to cross the South Atlantic in a rowing boat and responsible for several expeditions in the Arctic. Amyr was born an adventurer. At the age of 23, in 1978, he made his first international trip by motorcycle to Chile. He married Marina Bandeira, a competitive sailor, and a year later, twins Laura and Tamara were born. Three years later, Marina Helena, his youngest daughter, came into the world. “When I was a child, I heard stories my father told me. My father also spent the winter in Antarctica alone, in 1989,” she said in an interview with G1.
As a child, raised in Paraty, Rio de Janeiro, Tamara and her sisters were encouraged to sail. According to Tamara, in her book Nós: O Atlântico em Solitário (We: The Atlantic in Solitude), of all of them, she was the one who stood out the least. She didn’t have the coordination or strength needed for her competitions. Of course, over time, her dedication and focus became daily. On her first big voyage, from Norway to France, she still didn’t have the necessary confidence in herself and her potential. But she went. And she did it with the thought that if she didn’t try, she would never really learn or become good at it.
In addition to the encouragement, Amyr made a point of taking his family on some of his expeditions. Tamara, in an interview with Roda Viva, a Brazilian cultural TV program, reported that she and her family have been to Antarctica together five times, and said that her greatest memories are from her frozen family adventures.
For Tamara, being the daughter of who she is and having had the upbringing she did is not seen by her as a charge. Far from it. In an interview with Forbes magazine, she said:
“In sailing, it doesn’t matter who you are the daughter of, what your gender is, what your skin color is, where you come from… The sea is not going to be sweeter or rougher depending on your experience or your friendliness. So, in this experience alone at sea, there was no pressure related to how society sees me. It was just me and what I was capable of doing with the objects I had and the limits of my body, which are many. For a woman, it is very liberating to be at sea and have the chance to sail.”
Amyr, as a father, never intentionally helped or influenced Tamara’s choices, because, in his opinion, she should be able to cross her seas and face her challenges on her own, conveying the idea that she is not who she is because of what he had to offer. In Nós: O atlântico em solitário (We: The Atlantic in solitude) he says: “I sketched out a project, called my father and heard: ‘I’m not going to give you advice, I’m not going to give you objects. You won’t get a penny from me. It took me thirty years to have a boat ready to travel. Earn your way, build your boat, complete the trip, and only call me when you’ve arrived.”
Tamara continues,“My father had a lot of influence, a lot of impact, and inspired me a lot. But it wasn’t enough to be my father’s daughter for me to believe that I could also sail my boat, just as it isn’t enough to have an astronaut father to believe that you can be an astronaut when you’re a woman.”
Growing up is leaving
I was born, I grew up, and left. Her university life began in Brazil, at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of São Paulo. However, halfway through, she moved to France. From there, despite being fluent in French, she found it very difficult to attend classes and to deal with the way she was treated because she was Brazilian.
While in France and dealing with her academic life, she decided to take her first step as a sailor. In 2020, she went from Norway to France with her newly acquired sailboat, called Sardinha. The name came from her grandmother, who said that sardines may be small, but they are extremely intelligent and fast. From her first departure, the diaries Mil Milhas (A Thousand Miles) and Um Mundo em Poucas Linhas (A World in a Few Lines) were born, both published nowadays and a video series available on YouTube.
She told Forbes: “Maturity doesn’t come in a year or two, it’s something we build throughout our lives. And I’m not just talking about sailing. Having made my first crossing with limited resources had taught me how to do everyday things, how to fix problems on the boat with my own hands. My boat was small, bought with my own money, which came from the royalties from my books. And I knew every corner of it. It was where I read between 30 and 40 books, wrote and drew over the months.”
In 2021, after finally graduating from university, Tamara was determined to take on her biggest challenge yet: crossing the Atlantic. She sailed from Lorient (France) to Paraty, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), for 3 months. And so, she became the youngest Brazilian to cross the Atlantic Ocean. From this voyage, the book Nós: O Atlântico em Solitário (We: The Atlantic in Solitude) was born, becoming the #1 best-seller in the “Adventure Travel” category on Amazon.
Upon arriving on Brazilian soil, she wrote: “There is a solitary light on the dark horizon. It is the first sign of human life in seventeen days. Even if I don’t cross the last miles tonight, even if something prevents me from completing the last parts of my project, I will not be able to unsee what I have already seen. This light is Brazil.”
She realized that her strength was much greater than her mind or body could comprehend and that she could go further and in more challenging ways. She got a better boat, the Sardinha II, and so she set off on her next trip: from France to West Greenland, becoming the first Latin American woman to cross the polar circle solo. More than 200,000 people followed her in real time during her crossing, as she sailed among humpback whales and giant icebergs.
Does Klink have a moving admiration for challenges? Maybe.
Maybe she wanted to experience what her father once experienced, maybe she would like to experience wintering again, but this time, fully alone. It was then that in 2024, at the age of 27, she sailed alone in the direction of the frozen Arctic Sea, on the west coast of Greenland, after an intense 2-year preparation. Sardine II was anchored in an uninhabited fjord, and this trip was recorded as the first solo wintering by a woman in the Arctic. In total, she spent eight months in isolation, three months without sunlight, having snow as a source of water, and temperatures below forty degrees below zero.
When the Forbes journalist asked her: Were the loneliness, darkness, and cold your biggest challenges? And Tamara answered, “For me, these are just concrete facts about the place. The real challenge was dealing with other people’s fears, assessing the risks in a place that seemed cute to me, and managing the consumption of finite resources. I had to manage my diet with 1 kilo of food per day, for example. Taking care of finite resources is a challenge similar to what we are experiencing on planet Earth, right? Only on a larger scale.” Her journey and some of her moments in the Arctic were shown as a report in a TV journalistic program called “Fantástico” – probably the biggest one in Brazil – for all the Brazilians in prime time.
Is ‘lonely’ the right word?
Continuing in the interview with Roda Viva, Tamara says that she was only able to be alone because she spent a long time with people who helped her. In all her journeys, Klink has never been completely solo, and the term lonely may not fit the way she relates to herself. In addition to those who helped her even from far away, she always established relationships with other sailors and residents of the regions she travels through, especially with animals – whether for good or for bad.
Furthermore, her diaries, drawings, books, and imagination were always and still are her companions all the time. Tamara also reaffirms in this interview how she was discredited in all her projects, especially when she decided to go to Greenland, in the Arctic. How could a woman survive for months in that environment? Would she have the physical and mental strength to deal with unforeseen events on her boat? Would she know how to hunt? How would she protect herself from possible abusers or bear attacks? All of these questions were no match for her. Even with everyone disbelieving in her capabilities, Tamara knew that it was only possible for her to dream of this because many walked so that she could run. Many women in the past disguised themselves as men to join a crew, so that today she could consider the idea of wintering for eight months alone on her boat.
As Amyr once told her, “It’s the same amount of work to dream big as it is to dream small. When the project is too big, you can always cut it down. When it’s too small, it’s even harder to find help”
However, her main and most faithful companion was fear. From Norway to France, from France to Brazil, or from France to the Arctic, fear was never absent from any trip. In her writing, Atlantic in Solitude, Tamara echoes: “It keeps me company, wakes me up before the alarm clock goes off, makes me check the screws and keeps me alert even when there is no sign of danger. If I arrived in one piece, it was not because I was brave, but because I never stopped being afraid.”
Is sailing an art?
There is something political being done through her actions and her writing. Her projects are not carried out through her alone. As mentioned, despite her privileges, nothing was given to her for free, and because she is a woman she had to face challenges that were not presented to her as a child. When seeking sponsorship, she always encountered abuse of power, moral and sexual harassment. Many brands rejected her, many negotiated as if Tamara were an object, and many did not even have time for her proposals.
Upon achieving her goals, Tamara realized what awaited her for the rest of her life. The discredit she would face when she tried to sail, cross the ocean, or spend the winter in the Arctic. Klink realized what it meant to be a woman and, upon isolating herself from the same world that disbelieved in her, she realized her femininity, power, and strength that not even she would have believed she was capable of. She learned to hunt, fish, sew her skin, inject medication, repair her sail, monitor her engine, and so many other things.
With this, she developed an extremely discerning and inspiring power of speech, especially for us women. In other words, she sometimes wondered, adrift at sea, why she couldn’t feel free and normal about being without her bikini even with no one looking at her. Also, she understood that menstruating in the city of São Paulo is the same as menstruating in the cold of the Arctic, and that, by the way, her period did not make her weaker, as everyone would say to her. Tamara concluded for Forbes, “One thing I feel is about the meaning of being alive. There is nothing more liberating for a woman than sailing alone.”
Today, Tamara is one of the most powerful voices in the global environmental debate and on female power, having won several awards and recognition. She gives speeches around the world, speaks Portuguese, English, and French fluently, and seeks to cover political debates, in defense of the environment and human rights through her sailing and writing. Her base is currently in Greenland and feelings such as love, anger, and longing remain entirely hers. She will continue to navigate entire worlds with her words and being political with her art, that is for sure, sailing.
“My friends say that I’ ll never want to return to dry land, to a fixed address, to fixed relationships, but they do not understand: Every boat needs a port. From where to set off, to where to return. It needs to change parts, fill tanks, and rest. Above all, it needs time on land to desire the sea again and find new reasons to cross it.” – Tamara Klink.
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The article above was edited by Beatriz Gatz.
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