Tamara Klink Safe

 

Tamara Klink is safe - she successfully made it out of the Chukchi Sea ice field to Nome, Alaska, although it wasn't easy and for a day or two, I wasn't sure that the Sardinha 2 hadn't sunk.

After sailing west into the Northwest Passage, finding an open route through an ice field in the Chukchi Sea and making it almost as far as Wrangell Island, Russia's Northern Sea Route Administration told her she was in violation of their closure decision and ordered her to turn around back to the Bering Sea. The way to Wrangell and the East Siberian Sea beyond was free of ice but the way back to the Bering was now choked with heavy ice, even worse than when she had first crossed it. But despite the fact that she was exhausted and desperately needed sleep after her first crossing, she was nonetheless ordered by the Russian authorities to turn back and cross the ice field a second time under penalty of arrest and prison.  

She complied, sailing as close to the coast as possible, where the currents push ice away from the shore. As she proceeded, the ice concentrations got worse and worse but she had to keep sailing on because the wind was forecast to start pushing more ice against the coast, making things even tougher. Her boat hit some ice in the dead on an Arctic night, and she found seawater in the bilge but couldn't tell where it was coming from. "I’m getting less and less sure we’ll make it out alive," she wrote in her ship log.

"With this fog, ice, and 25kt of wind, I’m not even sure they could see my life raft. And would anyone bother to mount a rescue? Why would they spend energy trying to save a recreational foreigner when they have so many other things going on? 

"I feel very naive and stupid for having come here. I wish I had stayed at home, with my family. I wish my dreams were more ordinary — like finding love and having a house. I wish I had someone else onboard to share shifts and allow me to sleep."

As she advanced through the labyrinth of ice, the clock was ticking. With worsening weather in the Bering Strait, the longer it took her to get through the ice, the worse the conditions would be crossing the Bering. But there was nowhere for her to stop, even with her boat taking on water. The potential lagoons were far behind and trapped in ice, and in any event, the charts were too poor for her to feel safe there when the wind picked up. "Besides that," she noted, "I cannot stay here, I NEED to leave this land" even if it meant crossing the Bering  in a storm while bailing water out with buckets.

Sleep deprived and trying to navigate between 20-minute naps, she hugged the coast trying to distinguish hallucinations from reality. "I see more and more pieces of ice with human faces and shapes. They seem to be dancing, changing expressions, drifting toward the boat." Despite her exhausted condition, she had to climb the mast twice in the middle of the ice fields, and managed to find open paths even in the densest areas. She kept pushing on until she was finally far enough from the coast for ice to become rare. That night, as she made it into open water, she wrote, "I pushed myself and the boat to our limits. We overcame every obstacle we met on our way." 

"But," she added, "I still have the feeling of defeat."

Unfortunately, the challenges weren't over. The seas were building in the Bering Strait and while she would have been intimidated by the forecast three das earlier, after all she had been through in the Chukchi ice field, she was starving for open water, no matter the size of the waves. "I am thankful I am still alive and sailing by myself in a floating boat," she said, "instead of drifting on a piece of ice like Shackleton and his crew." 

The Bering Strait has a bad reputation but as she crossed amid 30- to 40-knot wind gusts, she couldn’t care less. "What’s the worst thing that can happen?," she wrote. "Capsizing?" The waves got bigger and washed over the deck as she crossed, with one eventually hitting her boat from the side so violently the boat heeled and everything on the shelves fell over her "as if it were raining books." 

She finally made is across the Strait to Alaska's Bering Peninsula but for some reason, the Sardinha's online tracker stopped updating when she was only a few miles outside of Nome. Day after day, the tracker kept showing the boat in open water just off the coast, when there was no conceivable reason that she wouldn't pull into harbor to repair leaks and get some rest. What's more, fellow Arctic sailor Ella Hibbert was there aboard the Yeva, and if there's anyone who would understand what she had been through and provide assistance or just moral support, it would have been Hibbert. I feared the worst: after first crossing the Chukchi ice field and then the Bering Strait, her leaky boat had sank just before she finally made it to Nome. 

But fortunately that was not the case, and when the tracker finally came back on line, it showed she not only had reached harbor in Nome, but she had already left, sailing south to points as yet undisclosed.