Amyr Klink
“I am known in Brazil for being a super planner, but there comes a time when you need to stop being a theorist and execute.”
Amyr Klink is a legendary Brazilian sailor who became the first (and to this day only) person to ever row solo across the South Atlantic Ocean, a feat he accomplished in 1984 when he covered an incredible 3,700 nautical miles in 100 days using only the power of his massive, heaving bronzed biceps and presumably some kind of blood pact with Poseidon. During the voyage he braved 30-foot waves, fought sharks with an oar, survived dehydration and heatstroke, and did it all in a boat that was literally designed to flip upside down a lot.
Then, when he'd accomplished that incredible feat, he went on and circumnavigated the globe in a sailboat three times – twice solo — including one trip that took him nearly two years because his ship got stuck in the ice of Antarctica for seven months, and another time when he managed to solo sail a ship around the world in 88 days by picking the shortest, most direct, and wildly most dangerous route – directly around the damn South Pole. He did this is a sailboat he designed and built himself, spent the epic Homeric voyage sleeping in 30-minute intervals so he didn't crash into an iceberg, and worked the entire ship himself – hauling in lines and pulling up jibs, repairing the boat mid-trip when necessary, navigating the entire trip by looking at the stars because GPS is for noob fucking casuals.
Amyr Klink was born in Sao Paulo in 1955, but when he was just a couple years old he moved to the coastal town of Paraty, which is kind of between Sao Paulo and Rio. From a young age, he grew to love the sea, and spent his early days fishing, building and rowing canoes, and basically doing any job he could find that involved being on a boat or in the water. He became a master sailor and rower, crushed competitions across Brazil, and even took his canoes several hundred miles from home and up into areas like the Amazon River (a pretty famously-terrifying river full of deathtraps, piranhas, and crocodiles). But as his awards and accomplishments began mounting up, the waterways of South America became more and more familiar to him, and the sailing trophies and the "first guy to do this shit" accolades became too routine, Amyr Klink decided he wanted to do something so unbelievably terrifying and lethal that no human had ever done it before (or since):
He was going to be the first guy to row solo across the South Atlantic, from the southern part of Africa to his home in Brazil.
In this thing:
That is a tiny-ass rowboat that I wouldn't feel safe riding around the completely land-locked lake next to my house, which has no waves and can be seen from the shore by onlookers at all times, but In the summer of 1984, twenty-eight year old Amyr Klink decided he was going to spent a hundred days manhandling that hollowed-out chunk of wood across 3,700 miles of open water, braving storms, waves, heat, and sun – without aid, without help, and without a GPS.
Klink loaded up that boat with food and water, shipped it to Namibia in a container vessel, and then, when he arrived at the airport, was pretty much immediately informed that there was a really good chance the Namibian government was going to seize the boat and hold it for ransom, because Namibia in 1984 was one of those fucked-up places where governments just kind of do that shit to you if they think they can grift a few extra bucks out of it. So, despite months of planning for the trip, Amyr Klink basically got off the plane, hauled ass to the coast in a motorcycle, unpacked the boat from its container ship, made sure it still had all its pieces intact, and threw it in the water, rowing off the coast of Africa in the midst of a torrential rainstorm with huge tidal swells and waves and stuff — because if he didn't launch this mission in the most dangerous possible conditions he was going to be stuck figuring out how to navigate the bureaucracy of a country run by psycho totalitarian dicatators who never met a diplomatic situation that couldn’t be solved by jamming an AK-47 into someone’s face.
Klink rowed off into the horizon, towards the endless blue that stretched out forever in every direction, and for the next 100 days there was nothing but him, the boat, and what was presumably the most epic set of hand callouses ever recorded. He spent those three months hanging out with dolphins and whales, rowed that little boat over 16-meter (meter!) waves, and was at one point attacked by sharks so hard that he had to fight them off by smacking them in the fucking face with his oars. Using only the stars for navigation, and without any outside assistance or backup, Klink rowed twelve hours a day, every day, for nearly three months. At one point barnacles started growing on the bottom of the ship, so he had to swim under the damn boat and scrape off the barnacles while he was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Oh, and that reminds me of the most insane thing of this entire trip – Klink was talking about planning for it, and he was basically like "oh, yeah, ships capsize all the time when you're rowing in open water, so you have to design a ship that can be easily flipped back over if it capsizes."
That’s right — this ship was designed to flip upside-down, dumping the rower into open water, and then be flipped back over again mid-trip. And, according to Klink, he had to do this not once or twice over the course of his journey, but like sometimes multiple times per day.
It took Amyr Klink a hundred days and six hours to row from Luderitz, Namibia to Salvador, Brazil – a distance of 3,700 miles, or roughly the same distance if you paddled a goddamn swan boat from Miami, Florida to Bar Harbor, Maine…. And then back to Miami again. When he arrived on the shores of Brazil, he had just a liter and a half of fresh water left in his boat. All he said about this in the best-selling book about his journey, A Hundred Days Between Sky and Sea, was that "something went wrong with the numbers. I was supposed to come home with nothing."
It was the first time anyone ever rowed solo across the South Atlantic Ocean.
It's never been done again.
After making international headlines with this insane feat of fist strength, there really wasn't too much more this guy could do in a rowboat to prove how monstrous his biceps and balls were. Klink decided he needed a new adventure. And so, two years after the epic trans-oceanic rhomboid workout, Klink took his first trip to Antarctica, the coldest and most completely miserable frozen wasteland on earth, and decided, yeah, this kicks ass.
So, in December of 1989, Amyr Klink set sail, alone, in a 100-foot sailboat he designed and built himself, and spent the next 642 days sailing from the South Pole to the North Pole. He rounded Antarctica, went over to Cape Town, South Africa, then headed up to the North Pole, and spent seven months up there with his tiny sailboat frozen in the ice. During the 27,000 mile voyage he worked the sailboat entirely himself — a much more strenuous job than you might imaging — and, because he didn't even bring a goddamn anchor with him, this meant that he couldn't really get away without sleeping for more than 45 minutes at a time because while he was sleeping nobody was looking at where the hell the ship was going. He went from pole to pole, sailing the entire length of the globe’s Longitude. He then returned in October 1991 after 22 months at sea, wrote another book that became a bestseller in Brazil, married a world champion sailor chick, had three daughters, got his MBA, founded the National Sea Museum of Brazil (stocking it pretty much entirely with his own personal canoe collection), and then spent the next couple years planning a mission to sail solo around the entire circumference around the continent of Antarctica just for the hell of it. It's the shortest and most direct way to circumnavigate the globe, but if you think that makes it easy, you should take a second and think about what giant-ass bricks of sub-oceanic icebergs are famous for doing to ships throughout history, and reconsider your position.
So in 1998 Amyr Klink left South Georgia Island in another ship he designed himself, sailing solo, and he circumnavigated the globe in just 88 days of extremely challenging, ultra-dangerous sailing through some of the most frozen-ass terrifying waters on earth. He crossed the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans, covered 14,000 nautical miles, and hung out with penguins and seals and shit whenever he got lonely. A few years later, he circumnavigated Earth again, by the same route, but this time he brought a crew of five and managed to shave twelve days off his time. His book about the adventure, Sea Without End, was yet another bestseller.
My Brazilian father-in-law is a sailor, with a really cool boat and thousands of hours of experience sailing it around the coast of South America, and Amyr Klink is his hero – to hear him talk about this guy, and the crazy shit that he's done in his career, is like listening to those old-timey boxing guys tell stories about watching Muhammad Ali fight, or old-school Reddit neckbeards describe the first time they played Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis. Klink is a true legend in Brazil, a national hero, and mytholgoical figure among hardcore sailors. Many of the deeds he accomplished during his incredible thirty-year career sailing solo on the most dangerous waters on earth may never be duplicated.
"Worse than not finishing a trip is never leaving."