The kayak OLO was professionally designed and made in Andrzej Arminski shipyard located in Szczecin, Poland . As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. He spent 100 days paddling the circumference of the Baltic Sea. He witnessed the formation of storm clouds and the deafening calm that accompanied them. His father built him a bicycle from scrap parts, and when he was 15 he rode it across the country. It was raining. Bigger than the Atlantic! Doba chimed in. At age 64, after 42 years of marriage, she still adores Doba, and her acceptance of him is absolute easier than it used to be, in fact. For 110 days, Mr. Doba paddled eastward on his specially designed fiberglass kayak, Olo. Nobody cares if you cross the Atlantic in a kayak. Your . The primary challenge is not physical. After breaking off those wings, it took me only a few seconds to adjust and start to enjoy such an unexpected improvement of my kayak, says Doba. On the way to my grandmothers house for the holidays, he wanted to be dropped off on a river and asked us to pick him up on the way back. Chmielinski had a hard time finding a ship captain on the island who was willing, in dangerous weather, to put Doba back out in the ocean near where hed gone off course. Then he sat down and fell asleep.. Aleksander Doba (9 September 1946 22 February 2021) was a Polish kayaker known primarily for his long voyages crossing oceans. The 'extreme cruelty' around the global trade in frog legs, What does cancer smell like? It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. Nonetheless, Gabriela was not prepared for Dobas first trans-Atlantic expedition. Aleksander doba. Polish Kayaker Is Paddling Across the Atlantic for the Third Time 69-year-old Aleksander Doba left New York on Sunday in a kayak bound for Portugal. He has no interest in dying in his bed. This man rowed a fucking houseboat across an ocean, absolutely unreal. For Aleksander Doba, pitting himself against the wide-open sea storms, sunstroke, monotony, hunger and loneliness is a way to feel alive in old age. With my hand on my heart, it wasnt my idea, Doba told me when I met him in Poland in January. After four months at sea, Polish adventure kayaker Aleksander Doba has arrived in Bermuda where he will make repairs to his broken rudder before continuing o. He started in Lisbon, Portugal on October 5th, 2013 and the goal was to arrive in Florida sailing 5,400 nautial miles. The air that day hovered around 40 degrees about 4 degrees Celsius. Doba paddled naked. Doba rotated through three kinds of freeze-dried porridge for breakfast, four kinds of freeze-dried soup for lunch and an assortment of a dozen freeze-dried entrees. He thought about his dead parents. His odyssey concluded that September when he paddled into the port in Le Conquet, France. But after she got the bill for $500, she says, the desire to talk decreased. Me, fine, he shouted in English, pointing to himself and giving the thumbs up. Meet the man who solo kayaked the Atlantic Ocean - three times. Boat Design Net does not necessarily endorse nor share the view of each individual post. Chmielinski also had been coordinating Dobas logistics. Doba flew back to Poland; returned to his hometown, Police, in the countrys northwest, where he had been managing maintenance and repairs at an enormous chemical factory; and swore off kayaking with a partner ever again. His kayak,I rowed varsity crew in highschool and got into kayaking and poling in college. It should be noted that he accomplished it using only weekends and normal, 26-day leave. When a few landed on my kayak, I didnt have to eat my lyophilized food for dinner that night.. This would have been Doba's third transatlantic crossing. He did it three times, setting records and becoming a national hero in Poland. Sometimes he took his young sons, Bartek and Czesiek, born in 1979 and 1982. [4][17] With his wife Gabriela he had two sons: Bartomiej and Czesaw. Aleksander Doba, a 74-year-old retired engineer with a thick white beard and a piercing gaze, was a popular figure in Poland. Doba also brought two sailing harnesses, which resemble climbing harnesses but are worn on the chest instead of the legs; he uses these to attach himself with a carabiner to the boat. [4] He studied mechanical engineering at Poznan University of Technology and worked in a chemical factory most of his life. 2 November 2015. For Aleksander Doba, pitting himself against the wide-open sea storms, sunstroke, monotony, hunger and loneliness is a way to feel alive in old age. After he graduated from Poznan University of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering, Doba met Gabriela Stucka, his future wife, on a backpacking trip. When does spring start? The weather was disgusting humid and hot. Or the afternoon, a week later, on that same river, when he succumbed to the temptation of eating pancakes, tomato soup and rice at the Milk Bar restaurant when he should have been at his campsite, by his kayak, eating cold canned goulash in order to condition his body for arctic temperatures. He grew up ice skating on ponds and skiing through forests. Three weeks later, he reached Florida. So I thought: Well, he might not come back.. Near his house, he said, there was a pond, behind the pond was a forest, in the forest there were mushrooms and behind all that was a small airport with gliders and storks, which migrated there for the summer. Arminski, the boatbuilder, spent many hours trying to argue Doba out of it. Three times. Three days in, Doba received his first storm warning. The two voyages were the longest open-water kayak voyages ever made. Trans Atlantic kayak completed by Aleksander Doba. That October, he paddled from Senegal to Brazil in 99 days. I even do oceanic expeditions as a tourist. In both cases, they held me at gunpoint with rifles, pistols, and machetes. Doba traveled an average of 30 miles a day, often paddling at night, when the temperatures dropped. The first time Polish kayaker Aleksander Doba tried to paddle across the Atlantic Ocean in 2007, he didn't get far. But then Doba turned his SPOT and his phone back on. Aleksander Doba kayaked the Atlantic EN: I drove from Brussels to Le Conquet (Brest) in France to greet Polish adventurer Alex Doba who finished his 3rd kayak transatlantic in exactly 110 days (16 May - 3 Sept). His body appears to be assembled from parts belonging to people of vastly different ages. (That didnt work.) A real katorga, says Doba, who is Polish katorga being the Polish word for forced labor in Siberia. He married Gabriela Stucka in 1975, and they settled in a town called Police, where he got a job at a chemical plant. Adventurer of 2015 ! Three times, he paddled 200 to 300 miles, only to get pushed back by the winds and currents. Doba, for now, has a carefully constructed answer. He wasnt a man who necessarily looked forward to spending Christmas with the family, his son Czeslaw said. After his salt-water-drenched clothes became too irritating, he navigated the rest of his trip buck naked. Shoot, the devil says. Dobas response to Gabrielas concern about what hed do in a crisis, if the closest land was the bottom, was to say there will be no crisis. But by katorga, Doba does not mean an activity he does not wish to do. I was just paddling down the river, he explained. In 1989, he spent 108 days on the . It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. When Aleksander Doba kayaked into the port in Le Conquet, France, on Sept. 3, 2017, he had just completed his third and by far most dangerous solo trans-Atlantic kayak trip. An expedition, he told me. The first time I visited my future mother-in-law, she served ducks blood soup. Kind, gracious, enthusiastic Poles kept bringing me shots of alcohol, which I tried to wave off. Reviews, News & Stories Paddling Buyer's Guide Paddling Trip Guide. The 68 year-old mechanical engineer from the Polish city of Police, talked to Polska.pl about wind traps, the glistening . Aleksander Doba, a Polish traveler, adventurer, and world record holder who in his 60s became the first person to kayak unaided across the Atlantic and set the world record for the longest open-water kayaking expedition, has died while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro: The 74-year-old - once named by National Geographic as its Adventurer of the Year - had been "fulfilling his dream . The majority of Dobas sleeping cabin, which he reaches by sliding himself through a portal the size of a laptop, affords him, when hes lying down, 15 inches of headroom. On April 19, 2014, Doba, who is now 68, paddled the final stroke of his 7,716-mile transatlantic journey, docking OLO, his 23-foot kayak, in a marina in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. The voyage took him 196 days to complete, and he paddled 6,300 miles. But he had promised himself, when he left New Jersey, that he would kayak not just to Europe but to the Continent proper. When autocomplete results are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. A Polish adventurer who crossed the Atlantic three times by kayak unaided has died climbing Kilimanjaro, his family said on Tuesday. If I survive., One unseasonably balmy January morning, Doba, dressed in baggy Gore-Tex pants and rain boots, handed me a blue plastic paddle, waved me into the front of a red double kayak, took out his hearing aids and declared, happily, shoving us off, Now I am in the silent zone. We had gone to a river-veined lowland of central Poland for the 53rd annual International Winter Kayaking Congregation, an event that sounds grand but was really just 60 Polish people, at or past middle age, spending a weekend in January together kayaking, drinking and hanging out at a lodge. He was named 2015 Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. He then sat down on a rock and "just fell asleep".[19]. Dobas father, a master at building and repairing things from scraps, made his son a bike. He was a few . The tool he used to accomplish this was a sea anchor, basically a parachute, secured to the stern of the kayak with a rope, that he set underwater to increase drag. End of the expedition How did he justify it to himself? To be precise: I was a Jew with the flu about to go kayaking in Poland in January not a setup likely to end well. On Sunday, May 7 2017, Alexander "Olek" Doba, took off from Sandy Hook Bay in New York City in his well-known kayak "OLO". He passed out. The day I arrived in Warsaw, a very chic woman named Martyna Wojciechowska, the host of a Polish documentary TV show called Woman at the End of the World, showed up at my hotel to explain Doba to me. He died like an adventurer after . June 09, 2016. But the community raised money for him, and on Oct. 3, 2013, off he went. Then the devil says to the Frenchman, You must jump. The Frenchman says, What does this mean?. But the inside of the apartment feels much better: shoes in the entrance hall; pencil marks of grandchildrens heights in the kitchen door jamb; atlases, kayaking trophies and snow globes of family photos in the living room. With a long grey beard, a big smile on the face and the looks of a pensioner on holiday, Aleksander Doba didn . Three years later in 2013 he crossed the . When the ship circled back to him again, Mr. Doba shouted a vulgarity in Polish, and they left for good. We watched them in his living room together with Gabriela. He then reached Acara at 17:50 local time (99 days, 6 h, 20 min). AD: No, although 40 nights of strenuous effort to break out of the trap of unfavorable winds in the Bermuda Triangle drained me very much. Sadly, he passed away this week while climbing Kilimanjaro. [2], Doba has also paddled in a kayak with others around the Baltic Sea (in 1999, 80 days, 4227km), from Police to Narvik (in 2000, 101 days, 5369km) and around Lake Baikal (in 2009, 41 days, 2000km). After, on weekends Doba would put a kayak on a train, debark as close to a river as possible and walk the kayak, on a wheeled contraption built from bicycle and stroller parts, 25 miles if necessary to put in. Shortly after, a huge Greek ship steamed alongside Doba, seeking to rescue him. This is the only one thing you can do.. Adventure paddler Aleksander Doba willed his 71-year-old body and 1,600-pound kayak through a 4,000-mile trans-Atlantic journey Someone had forgotten to fund the prepaid credit card that covered the bill. AD: Before the first Transatlantic Kayak Expedition, my wife tried very hard to make me drop such an idea. He is currently working on two books, Home Works and Cuba. He last shot a smoke sauna in Estonia for the magazine.Correction: March 23, 2018 An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of Piotr Chmielinskis navigation of the Amazon. The huge group of his supporters keeps growing . Its 20-meter-long tail was wagging. He intended to keep muscle tone in his legs by swimming, but he had to abort that plan because his body in the water attracted sharks. Doba with the writer on the Brda River in central Poland in January. The fabric smelled horrendous and aggravated his skin, so he abandoned clothes. He studied the water closely. My flu lingered. In three weeks, Ill be 71, he says in one. Touch device users, explore by touch or . The devil says, It means that life is meaningless but when you jump you will look very chic, very modern. So the Frenchman jumps. [18], Doba died while climbing Kilimanjaro on February 22, 2021. Better than sushi.). [10], After resting there, he initially planned to paddle another 6,000 kilometers north along the shorelines of the Americas to Washington, D.C.[12] However, he eventually decided to transport his transatlantic kayak to Peru instead and embarked on a journey down the Amazon River but after being attacked and robbed twice in Brazil he had to quit. I was infected with a virus. In 2003, when he was already the most seasoned kayaker in Poland, a Polish professor approached him to get advice on his quest to kayak across the Baltic Sea. Mr. Dobas three trans-Atlantic voyages earned him Guinness World Records titles, and in recent years he enjoyed celebrity status in his native Poland. On the warmer part of the Atlantic Ocean, flying fish were a big, unexpected attraction. Doba returned to Police to a heros welcome and 14 months later flew to Washington to receive an award from the National Geographic Society as the 2015 Peoples Choice Adventurer of the Year. From what we gather, he was euphoric to reach the summit. For 110 days, Mr. Doba paddled eastward on his specially designed fiberglass kayak, Olo. [7][8] He was 65 years old when he undertook this journey. As he braced for his life, the rope tethering his sea anchor (the only thing keeping his kayak stable) broke off. But I dont have a film. The trip could have easily ended five days earlier, when Doba was just a few hundred feet off the British coast. The most serious trouble came for Doba when he hit a storm that lasted two days. He communed with the turtles, whose shells he tapped while they swam alongside him to make sure they were alive, and the birds, who landed on Olo for a rest and often entered his cabin and did not want to leave. The second trip was to raise the bar, Doba says. Dozens of sharks checked on me, but one was ready to attack me, and I had to whack his head with the paddle really hard to make him leave, Doba remembers. His skin looks 71. He was known for his long voyages crossing oceans. Then the AA batteries for his SPOT personal tracking device failed, and the retired engineer had to rig a new, delicate connection using AAAs. He relieved himself by leaning off the side or the stern. On April 19, 2014, Doba, who is now 68, paddled the final stroke of his 7,716-mile transatlantic journey, docking OLO, his 23-foot kayak, in a marina in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic SocietyCopyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. When he couldnt sleep, because of the unrelenting stuffiness of his cabin and the waves crashing through the portal onto his head, Doba thought about his wife, children and his young granddaughter. I never expected it would be so big, she said. His desire to conquer the sea grew from an innocent idea that gradually consumed him: He had kayaked everything else, so why not the Atlantic Ocean? Still, Gabriela did not want to be Penelope to Dobas Odysseus. Watch. At the time of this writing, real-time tracking indicates that Aleksander Doba is on or near the small French Island of Ushant on the south-western end of the English Channel. Forty-seven days after it stopped working, the phone came back on. 1,277 talking about this. He kayaked the coast of Norway to the Arctic Circle. The Polish adventurer was world-famous for his oceanic kayak voyages. Kayak fishing became very popular during the recession of around 2008-2010 when gas prices were soaring and recreational boating was becoming too expensive for . Joakim Eskildsen is a Danish photographer based outside Berlin. During the expedition storms threw him off course and he had to sail 1,300 additional nautical miles to . The Daily. He was unaccustomed to wearing pants. Aleksander Doba, a 64-year-old native of Poland, took off from Dakar, capital of the west African nation of Senegal, back on Oct. 26. I was just paddling down the river, he told the border patrol when he inevitably was caught. Many things can go wrong while at sea, and if something does go wrong, help can be . She also left her daughter at age 8 months to go climb a mountain in Antarctica because she was trying to complete the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on each continent, and achieving that goal, at that time, felt like a matter of life or death. Polish long distance kayaker Aleksander Doba was planning to set off to attempt an Atlantic Ocean crossing alone at the age of 69 years. He rode through 30-foot waves. Without the wings, the kayak had greater lateral stability and was less sensitive to wind. Then a woman who noticed me coughing approached with a little glass of thick red liquid that looked like cough syrup. So Doba moves toward the crisis, just as he moves toward the suffering. (This did work, in that Doba managed to drill the holes, but he couldnt steer.) A week later, three bandits went through my stuff for half an hour. The next day, hearing aids restored, Doba drove us to Police, and a few days later, he addressed a question that had been nagging at me: Why did he go on that third trip? Unauthorized use is prohibited. [5][6], Doba's first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean was from Senegal to Brazil in 2010 and spanned 5394 kilometers. "Na szczycie Olek poprosi o 2 minuty przerwy, usiad na kamieniu i po prostu zasn", "Kayaker, 64, completes marathon paddle across Atlantic", "Landfall: Aleksander Doba reaches South America", "Kajakarstwo - Aleksander Doba przepyn Atlantyk", Unofficial blog for Aleksander Doba Transatlantic Kayak Crossing, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aleksander_Doba&oldid=1104141716, Recipients of the Order of Polonia Restituta, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 13 August 2022, at 00:00. He is paddling for New Smyrna Beach, Florida, 4,700 nautical miles away. By ELIZABETH WEIL Every time he closed his eyes, Doba told me, I dreamed I was paddling in the winter in Poland. He lost 45 pounds. Doba drifted around for days eating freeze-dried goulash and chocolate bars. In mid-September 2013, Doba still did not possess all the gear he wanted to take on his trip. The more you dont believe in Polish people, the more determined we are. Long distance kayaker Aleksander Doba is at it again. kontakt: aleksanderdoba@gmail.com On February 22, Aleksander Doba made the last few strides to the top of Kilimanjaro, a pleased 74-year-old man, waving to fellow climbers with his envy-inducing muscular arms, a smile beaming from behind the curls of a wild beard. But I was my own little speck in the vast universe. He arrived in Tanzania last month. Can we bring a species back from the brink? His mean speed was 2.26km/h, and he averaged 54km per 24 hours, with a maximum 24hour distance of 126.5km.