Tamara Klink navigates 9,000 km, writes two books and plans more

In the dark of night in Recife, close to the coast, Tamara Klink, 24, heard the noise of the engine of an approaching speedboat. Then he heard his mother’s voice, Marina, horrified:

“Oh my God, Tamara! This boat is too small!”

The complement was from Sister Laura.

“And it’s nothing safe.”

She could be sad that this was the reception after three months of traveling alone 5.6 miles (9,000 kilometers) of the Atlantic Ocean. Or not to care about it and be glad you arrived.

What she felt was pride.

“My father later said he was impressed because the main shackle on the boat [peça que serve para unir ou fixar cabos] it was smaller than the one he wears on his key chain. It was at this point that I realized. That path was mine. My boat was small, but for me it was giant because it was my infinite school”, he explains.

The father is Amyr Klink, the most famous Brazilian sailor, the first person to cross the South Atlantic by rowing and with different maritime expeditions in recent decades. Trips that made him a writer as well.

Tamara was the youngest navigator in the country to cross the Atlantic alone. He left Lorient, France, in August, and arrived in Recife earlier this month aboard a sailboat that he called, at his grandmother Ana’s suggestion, “Sardinha”. That’s because it’s small, resilient and everywhere.

It was with this vessel, bought thanks to a loan from a friend, that she made her first solitary adventure. He sailed from Norway to France last year.

The trip yielded two books. “A Thousand Miles” is his diary from that period. “A World in Few Lines” are his poems. They will be released in December by the publisher Peirópolis.

“They’re poems about growing up,” as she defined it. Tamara makes it clear all the time that the crossings are processes of personal learning. A way to discover your limits. Or realize they don’t exist.

“After the trip I took the diary and began to look at it with affection. The poems were born first. At some point it might have made sense to write about the process of growing up, of going after a dream. Of starting to build questions that only us. ourselves, we can answer. It’s the impossible attempt to make the world fit in a few lines,” he says.

It was not difficult to see that his path would be to write books. Amyr had already charged her for that. His entire family imagined it was going to happen. Thoughts come easily to you when you talk. It doesn’t seem to make an effort. Tamara Klink speaks more with her eyes than with words when telling a story.

They open up when she explains how she was forced to hold the wheel of the boat for 30 hours, without taking her hands, because otherwise she would go back. Or when the bow sail wrapped around the steel cable. She had to climb the mast to undo the knot.

“I was scared. I was left with my feet dangling over the water. My life was suspended by a thread. If the cable was broken at any point and it came loose, I would fall and the trip would be over.”

Hanging and trying to unroll the sail, there was one of the rare moments on the trip when the question “what am I doing here?” crossed his mind.

On average, she calculates she has slept three or four hours a night. In several of them, she stayed awake. He passed through areas with a history of orca attacks, cases of piracy and was in the region of La Palma when the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted. Sardinha arrived in Recife damaged and with the autopilot not working, which made docking difficult.

Because of communication problems, he received weather reports for the day before.

Some difficulties were already foreseen for being a small boat, just over eight meters in length. Tamara rejected all suggestions that she should change it to cross the Atlantic. For what? It had taken her so long to master it and it wasn’t going to change.

Or as her grandmother Ana used to say when she heard Amyr Klink comment on the size of the vessel: “Don’t dispose of things that you didn’t buy.”

“When we finish the trip, look back and see everything that lived, realize that I was capable of going through these problems. Before starting, if I had a crystal ball that showed me the problems, maybe I wouldn’t have left. distance demands more of your emotional. It increases your capacity to be frustrated, to feel pain, to suffer.”

Again she returns, as if in circles, to the main theme: it is about growth.

Its capacity was taken to the limit when it approached the equator and encountered the phenomenon called Pirajá. They are dark clouds that bring heavy rain accompanied by a lot of wind. The rush of doing all the manual work on the boat and worrying about the sail left her physically and emotionally exhausted.

“When you’re exhausted, you lose the ability to decide. But I realized that only I could get myself out of there. No one would be at the helm if I needed to sleep, no one would pull the curtains, no one would steer the boat. It had to be me.”

On her social networks, updated by a friend who was on the ground, she began to receive messages from people who were inspired by her adventure. People who also wanted to travel, move to another city, get married, have children, but needed an example of courage. Tamara Klink found herself becoming a model, especially for women.

“Girls who want to do this, let them do it. May they command their boats and be protagonists. Maybe they are touched that I did it, but I was inspired by other women who came before me. I grew up with the image of people from sea ​​that were hard, brave, intolerant and men. When I started to dream of sailing, I thought about how I could be a man of the sea, if I wasn’t even a man?”

Tamara smiles at the memory. With the mouth and with the eyes.

“Having had the chance to take this trip and being a woman who laughs, jokes, writes texts without fear of saying she’s afraid, it shows that we don’t need to have superpowers to do things we want, make dreams come true.”

And the next dream is another trip. It just says it is “further south, down a few latitudes”. If there is a definite destination, prefer not to speak. It will be without the Sardine. He recognizes that the time has come to no longer cling to an object. You will need a bigger boat.

Other crossings will yield new books. These will be the longest journeys of all, because for her they will have to be eternal.

“I’m my father’s daughter. I’m from the school that is concerned with the eternity of books”, defines Tamara, considering that what she writes needs to last longer than crossing the oceans.

“Words travel farther than I do.”