The young Brazilian Tamara Klink was on site to watch the start of yesterday’s Globe40 prologue in Lorient. At 24 years of age, she became the first woman in her country to cross the Atlantic singlehanded. A performance she had dreamed of from a very early age and made it a reality on a small boat, bought for a song in Norway. We interviewed her dockside.
Tamara, what are your thoughts having witnessed the start of the Globe40 prologue?
I thought it was wonderful to see a fleet comprising skippers from such a diverse range of countries and backgrounds. There were Moroccan, Japanese and Dutch skippers… You don’t often get such a cosmopolitan line-up in races setting sail from Lorient. I think that as an overseas sailor, a Brazilian who has come to France to sail, I really identified with these skippers. Docking out here is fairly routine, but to consider that they won’t be back here again for 9 months is awesome. It was also really lovely to see the emotion of the families, who had come along to support the skippers as they set sail on their circumnavigation of the globe. When you’re aware how difficult it is to prepare a boat for this adventure, to head off to a distant country (France) to take the start of a race… that in itself is very special. There are boats which have had to cross the ocean just to make the start and families who have traversed the ocean to see them on their way. Perhaps for French sailors it’s not unusual to cast off from Lorient La Base and head out to sea, but I know that for a great many of them it has required a monumental amount of effort and almost an idealistic, utopian mindset.
What does the Globe40 course mean to you?
I imagine what a challenge it must have been for Manfred to organise this race. However, I’ve had the opportunity to stop off at some of the towns and cities that will host the Globe40 stopovers, like Cape Verde and Recife, and I was amazed to see the locals’ enthusiasm for this project and this concept. It’s a race which stops off in places which are far from conventional in the offshore racing domain, that aren’t just about going downwind, which is quite something when you consider that French boats are generally optimised for downwind racing. As such, I believe that it’s a really wonderful challenge, which is opening up new horizons for offshore racing as we speak and altering mindsets about just how far you can go with these boats.
What’s your view of Lorient and the set-up here to prepare boats and skippers for offshore racing?
To my mind, the locals don’t realise, or no longer realise what strengths this town has and what message it sends out to those of us undertaking our sailing projects. Elsewhere, in another country, dreams are seemingly impossible to realise. It’s hard to find people to support us and help us, so when we come here, we get the impression that our dreams are normal almost. Chatting with the overseas skippers in the Class Mini, they sense that they’ve found a place on earth where everything they’ve ever dreamed of is achievable, ordinary even. Even their major projects, which seemed unrealistic, are normalised here, simple even to some extent.