Feb. 7/2026: I found Kiana Weltzien (see photo up top) online a couple of years back and was immediately intrigued. It’s not every day you see a young woman sailing around solo on a super-primitive Wharram catamaran, and I certainly wasn’t the only one who noticed. Kiana’s YouTube sailing channel has over 50K subscibers, and her viddy documenting her first solo transatlantic has garnered over a million views. She has also been a featured guest on a few other YouTube sailing channels.
Now Kiana’s out with a feature-length documentary film, Women & the Wind, and I can tell you it was well worth the few shekels I shelled out to watch it on Vimeo. It follows Kiana and two other young women—Lærke Heilman, a Danish environmentalist, and Alizé Jireh, a filmmaker originally from the Dominican Republic—as they sail together on Kiana’s catamaran, Mara Noka, from North Carolina to the Azores documenting the proliferation of plastic waste in the ocean.
From the left: Kiana, Lærke, and Alizé aboard Mara Noka
Personally, I wasn’t too disappointed to find that very little of the film has much to do with plastic. Mostly it’s about how the three women bond and endure together during a 30-day passage, including through some prolonged gale conditions, on a boat entirely lacking in modern creature comforts with little protection from the elements. A healthy reminder, if you will, of what ocean sailing could be like in the not-so-distant past.
The most impressive thing about the film is that it is stunningly beautiful. In spite of the fact that Alizé was seriously seasick for about half the passage and this is her first feature-length film, her camera work is exceptional. Somehow she has no trouble getting big waves to look big in pix (a trick I’ve never mastered), and she has a very nuanced eye when it comes to depicting life onboard.
One question not addressed in the film is how Kiana ended up voyaging on such an extraordinarily crude vessel in the first place. I mean literally, it has tree limbs for spars. I’ve seen Haitian trading sloops that look more seaworthy.
Kiana with Mara Noka during a refit in Florida prior to the Azores passage. The boat is a 50-year-old Narai Mark 1, designed by James Wharram, that Kiana found derelict in Panama
The answer to that question, interestingly, is Hans Klaar.
Kiana, who had no sailing experience at the time, quit a real estate job in Miami back in 2016 and set out looking for adventure. First she did a stint as an au pair for a family on a cruising boat, then somehow segued into a crewing gig on Ontong Java, the primitive crab-claw rigged double canoe that Hans built on a beach in Gambia several years back.
Hans has been renowned for some time for voyaging on very simple multihulls, but also became notorious when he was jailed on rape charges in South Africa in 2011. Since getting back afloat, he has unfortunately gained a reputation for molesting female crew. Check out account number 12 in this Maritime Legal Aid & Advocacy post and you’ll get a clear idea of how he operates.
Kiana has previously cited Hans as her mentor and has referred to him as a boyfriend, but now seems to downplay the connection. She has declined, however, to disown him. You can learn more about Hans’ background growing up on a boat in this post I wrote about boat kids and Martinique Stilwell’s memoir Thinking Up a Hurricane. Martinique’s attitude toward Hans also seems ambivalent.
Too bad one of them (Kiana) is the enabler of a convicted rapist with a trail of victims, often very young, all over the world. You might want to edit your article to reflect that. Women should stand with other women, especially when they are survivors of sexual assaults by a convicted rapist. Not call him a “mentor”. Shame on Kiana.
https://www.facebook.com/sailingsafelywomen/posts/pfbid0SVeu7osam4pDZ2QfyTxABPWBqccQKdG4ymWGFLUT5kGFDvQFtaiUcvjeYfxHidTbl
Hi Leila: Did you read the whole post? There’s in fact a bit on Hans at the end, making it clear what sort of person he is, with the very same link you’ve just posted in your comment, plus another much stronger link to an account by a woman describing his predatory behavior in detail. Maybe you should check that out.
As to the trustworthiness of the boat, I believe she has crossed the Atlantic 4 times on this boat. I believe it has proved itself, as has she. Enjoyed the article, thanks.
Matt Ray, author of Global Hitchhiking: How I sailed around the world without a boat – https://a.co/d/0hjMRdtq