I dont know how I ended up here. The soldiers told Doba he had broken so many laws that they didnt know how to charge him. *Oficjalny fanpage Aleksandra Doby. I dont like it at all. He once became convinced that someone was watching him. The Search for Joshua Tree's Missing Hiker. Transatlantic passenger crossings became faster, safer, and more reliable with the advent of steamships in the 19th century. He was known for his long voyages crossing oceans. Today, listen to the story of one man who chose to paddle toward the existential crisis that is life, crossing the Atlantic alone in a kayak. This man rowed a fucking houseboat across an ocean, absolutely unreal. The 'extreme cruelty' around the global trade in frog legs, What does cancer smell like? No retired man in Poland can afford to do these things, Doba explained. When he docked his kayak at the port in Le Conquet, France, on Sept. 3, 2017, he was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. He texted Arminski and Piotr Chmielinski, a Polish kayaker who in the mid-1980s, shortly after hed defected to the United States, was part of the first team to paddle the length of the Amazon. Can we bring a species back from the brink? 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. I am generally physically active, ride a bike, work in my garden, and enjoy walking.. For 110 days, Mr. Doba paddled eastward on his specially designed fiberglass kayak, Olo. I came very close to the line of my possibility and human possibility, he told The Times. Doba has a deep, almost performance-art-like sense of this. He has kayaked solo across the Atlantic 3 times, most recently in 2017 at the age of 70. . F. [7][8] He was 65 years old when he undertook this journey. Still, Gabriela did not want to be Penelope to Dobas Odysseus. Doba with the writer on the Brda River in central Poland in January. In photos from the ends of his trips, he looks ecstatic and feral, in the best possible sense, intrinsically wild and free. People ask me how old I am, and I say, I am not old! On the morning of Feb. 22, he reached Kilimanjaros summit with two guides. He went on to win the gold medal at the Open Academic Polish Championships in Whitewater Kayaking in 2003 at age 57 and defended the title the next year. The professor eventually persuaded Doba to cross the southern Atlantic with him from Ghana to Brazil in separate one-man kayaks, lashing those kayaks together at night to make a platform on which to sleep. The 68 year-old mechanical engineer from the Polish city of Police, talked to Polska.pl about wind traps, the glistening . With my hand on my heart, it wasnt my idea, Mr. Doba told The New York Times Magazine in 2018. However, in general, from my very low point of observation, the ocean looked clean. Mr. Dobas three daring voyages earned him Guinness World Records titles, and in 2017 he became the oldest person to kayak across the Atlantic. Then there is [the] satisfaction of great achievements.. Chmielinski and others came up with what Doba describes as exotic and expensive methods of rescue. She felt bad about it, she said, and she felt judged, but here we were, werent we? What if we could clean them out? When he arrived at his destination, he was greeted by one journalist. Sometimes he took his young sons, Bartek and Czesiek, born in 1979 and 1982. This was not Dobas first transatlantic crossing in OLO. Photo: Wikipedia. A real katorga, says Doba, who is Polish katorga being the Polish word for forced labor in Siberia. Polish adventurer and kayaker Aleksander Doba crossed the Atlantic by kayak a few days before turning 71 years old. Then the devil says to the Frenchman, You must jump. The Frenchman says, What does this mean?. Someone had forgotten to fund the prepaid credit card that covered the bill. He drank five cups a day of instant coffee. Unloading OLO from the sloop that returned Doba back to the exact spot where he had been forced off course, the kayak's so-called wings, designed to act as roll bars to keep the vessel upright, broke. [1] In 2017 he completed an eastward kayaking trip across the Atlantic. I consider myself to be a tourist, he explains. He is paddling for New Smyrna Beach, Florida, 4,700 nautical miles away. Physically, Doba did not seem to experience any difficulty beyond some uncomfortable and persistent skin rashes caused by prolonged exposure to saltwater. Not according to biology or history. Dobas father, a master at building and repairing things from scraps, made his son a bike. Aleksander doba. [2] (This worked a little, but not entirely.). (He ate all the meat options first.) 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. It was accomplished in a 7-meter sea kayak and set a record for the longest open-water crossing ever undertaken by a kayaker, at roughly 99 days (the previous longest kayak crossing belonged to Peter Bray who traveled from Newfoundland to Ireland in 2001 and took over 76 days, relying on muscle-power only and no sail). My flu lingered. His first crossing was in 2011, from Senegal, West Africa, to Brazil, a 99-day journey. He was greeted by one journalist and the Polish ambassador. Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the magazine. The next time I visited, my mother-in-law did not prepare that soup. A storm had damaged his rudder. The weather was disgusting humid and hot. Id been feeling buried, by stuff exactly as predictable as youd imagine for a working mother of two kids. When does spring start? June 09, 2016. Doba in Lisbon in October 2013, demonstrating how he would live aboard his kayak. When Doba finally said, I will go on the North Atlantic, I said, I will not participate in this, Arminski told me. He is a family man, whose positive attitude to life is contagious. The 70-Year-Old Master Kayaker Directories Newly added. [15][16] He has also jumped 14 times with parachute, piloted gliders for a total of 250 hours, and practiced cycling. One day, a colleague of Dobas said the factorys kayaking club was going on a two-week expedition. In 2010, Doba spent 99 days of the First Transatlantic Kayak Expedition paddling 3,400 nautical miles (3,913 miles) across one of the narrowest points of the Atlantic, between Dakar, Senegal, and Acarau, Brazil. "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. Aleksander Doba. Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Agence France-Presse Getty Images, Mr. Doba once said that his hunger to cross the Atlantic was not really his idea. [7] "I realized almost immediately that an ordinary kayak can't handle the open . Only one person had ever crossed the Atlantic in a kayak using solely muscle power, and he traveled island to island, from Newfoundland to Ireland. Everyone who cared about Doba opposed his third expedition the cold and stormy North Atlantic, from New Jersey to France. The World's Greatest Hitchhiker Aleksander Doba died as he lived, in pursuit of adventure, passing away on the very summit of Mount Kilimanjaro at the age of 74. Mr. Dobas three trans-Atlantic voyages earned him Guinness World Records titles, and in recent years he enjoyed celebrity status in his native Poland. His maternal grandmother was sent to Siberia. Sketch in hand, Doba drove from Police to Szczecin, the regional capital, and approached a yacht-builder named Andrzej Arminski. 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. He kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean three times, the last time in 2017, when he was 70. Then I saw it: a huge head, sticking out of the ocean, he told Canoe & Kayak magazine in 2014. The weather report was bad, but Chmielinski had arranged for a lot of press, and an entourage of kayakers had come to paddle out with Doba a ways, and he felt he had a duty to them. Long COVID patients turn to unproven treatments, Why evenings can be harder on people with dementia, This disease often goes under-diagnosedunless youre white, This sacred site could be Georgias first national park, See glow-in-the-dark mushrooms in Brazils other rainforest, 9 things to know about Holi, Indias most colorful festival, Anyone can discover a fossil on this beach. Doba, for now, has a carefully constructed answer. After taking in the view, he sat on a rock to rest. The whale swam here, and there, all around my kayak. What is wind chill, and how does it affect your body? Aleksander Doba in the Atlantic before arriving in Florida in April 2014. Doba's wizened but muscular frame and ancient, friendly face became familiar not just to the adventure world bu You can be made small by life or rage against it. AD: Before the first Transatlantic Kayak Expedition, my wife tried very hard to make me drop such an idea. This is Gabis Pacific!, Later that afternoon, Bartek, the couples older son, stopped by the apartment with his two elementary-school-age daughters. The idea was to do the crossing unsupported. The ships captain didnt think it was a great idea to set this rash-covered, sleep-deprived 70-year-old man back in the ocean alone. Aleksander Doba appears to be one such individual. The design by British civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a . So he stayed on the water nearly another week, in the one-meter-wide boat where hed endured towering waves, in the coffinlike cabin where he spent almost four months not sleeping more than three hours at a stretch, where he severely tried his loved ones patience in order to be lonely, naked and afraid. 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. [15], Aleksander Doba was born 9 September 1946 in Swarzdz, near Pozna, Greater Poland Voivodeship, Poland and lived in Police near Szczecin, West Pomeranian Voivodeship. 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. At the age of 70, Aleksander Doba became a legend with the kayak. I did not see oil slicks and there were not large amounts of trash, just single pieces of rubbish. These animals can sniff it out. Dobas electric desalinator broke, as it did before, and he had to spend several hours a day manually pumping seawater through an extremely fine filter to produce the five to nine liters of fresh water he needed to stay hydrated and prepare his freeze-dried food. In 1980, his co-workers asked him if he wanted to join their kayaking club, and soon he was spending all his weekends out on the water. He talks about his amazing adventures with passion and energy. It was his 3rd crossing without a sail. Then he paddled to the French shore. [4] He studied mechanical engineering at Poznan University of Technology and worked in a chemical factory most of his life. I was in a pickle! To avoid the nightmare of quiet conformity, Doba told me he said to his mother-in-law, This is a good soup! In mid-September 2013, Doba still did not possess all the gear he wanted to take on his trip. They are falling, falling a catastrophe is about to happen. [4] He quickly started going on kayaking expeditions regularly. He did have a satellite phone, and he texted with Arminski, who, as his trip navigator, sent a regular forecast for wind and weather. Doba was born in 1946 in Swarzedz, Poland, right after the end of World War II, when the country had been run over by the Soviets and the Germans, then bombed to dust. AD: OLO is 23 feet long and three feet wide and weighs 1,100 pounds, and I used a nine-foot-long kayak paddle. Aleksander Doba is a Polish kayaker known primarily for his long voyages crossing oceans. Forty-seven days after it stopped working, the phone came back on. AD: When I was alone on the ocean I had no fear for my life. X Actualizado a 24/02/2021 12:40 CET. Doba had promised himself he would be tougher than all that. They offered to throw him ropes. Mr Doba, from Poland, came ashore at Le Conquet, Brittany, which is . Will he cross the Atlantic again? How a zoo break-in changed the life of an owl called Flaco, Naked mole rats are fertile until they die, study finds. Dobas maternal grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the czarist army, was poisoned in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. But this specific soup I dont like. That was a shock to his mother-in-law, he said, but a short one. To prove themselves, Polish people will endure everything. This is a matter of the size and energy of the wave compared to the mass of the kayak. Beyond the boat rolling over, there is an even more catastrophic problem: A breaking wave transfers all the potential energy in the waves height into turbulent, violent kinetic energy. He was pummeled again by wind and waves. We know who this is. "It is with profound regret that we announce the death of the great . Dobas apartment building is a five-story cube of blank concrete, with blank concrete stairwells. He kayaked the coast of Norway to the Arctic Circle. However, in Brazil, while running the Amazon in my kayak in 2011, I survived two bouts of rogues with firearms and machetes. Can we bring a species back from the brink?, Video Story, Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. Gabriela traveled to Denmark to study how European Union countries handled problems like unemployment, alcoholism and lonely young mothers. His odyssey concluded that September when he paddled into the port in Le Conquet, France. [9][4] Doba's journey started at 15:30 Polish time[10] on 26 October 2010 in Dakar, Senegal, and ended when he reached Brazil, touching dry land at 10:12 local time for the first time in 98 days, 23 hours, and 42 min. Home. Aleksander Doba, a 74-year-old retired engineer with a thick white beard and a piercing gaze, was a popular figure in Poland. In the early 1970s, Mr. Doba graduated from Poznan University of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering. When a few landed on my kayak, I didnt have to eat my lyophilized food for dinner that night.. His father, Wincenty, was a mechanic. Aleksander Doba Olo . In addition to Czeslaw, Mr. Doba is survived by his wife; another son, Bartek; a sister, Wanda Kedzia; and three grandchildren. His hands and forearms look 30, straight off a Montana roper. Then he sat down and fell asleep.. Chmielinski also had been coordinating Dobas logistics. 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. So, Gabriela told me, she laid out for her husband all the reasons trans-Atlantic kayaking was stupid. Kayak legend Aleksander Doba (74 years) Dies on Kilimanjaro Summit. Heres the technology that helped scientists find itand what it may have been used for. He was, by then, 90 percent of the way across the ocean but had spent the last six weeks paddling in circles in the Bermuda Triangle, trapped by wind and currents. [4] He used a 23-foot kayak, weighing 1500 pounds when fully loaded. The devil says, It means that life is meaningless but when you jump you will look very chic, very modern. So the Frenchman jumps. How did he justify it to himself? Among Dobas bigger regrets in life are the times when he has succumbed, when he has perceived and reacted to suffering in conventional ways for instance, the night in April 1989 when he built a fire in order to make tea and dry his clothes while paddling on the Vistula River near the city of Plock, in central Poland. Before he arrived in France, he made a few GoPro videos. Their three sons, Dobas uncles, disappeared. Then the AA batteries for his SPOT personal tracking device failed, and the retired engineer had to rig a new, delicate connection using AAAs. Rowers whove paddled the Atlantic an easier proposition because rowing allows a person to recruit leg and back muscles have strapped themselves to the floors of their cabins to avoid being bounced around during storms and concussed, or worse. It was in 2010 that he started seriously planning to cross the Atlantic. When he gave me a last hug, maybe he didnt cry, but I saw his eyes, Bartek said. In 2010, when he kayaked from Senegal to Brazil, his skin broke out in salt-induced rashes, his fingernails nearly peeled off, and his eyes suffered from conjunctivitis. 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. Heres why each season begins twice. A breaking wave can do whatever it wants to a kayak. There was no engineering Olo for this. The first person in the world to paddle from Europe to America in a kayak across the Atlantic Ocean's widest point, Aleksander Doba also holds the record for the number of days (142) spent in a kayak in the ocean. Doba didnt begin kayaking until the age of 34 and didnt train physically for the journey. 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. Aleksander Doba, a 74-year-old retired . The more you dont believe in Polish people, the more determined we are. He grew up ice skating on ponds and skiing through forests. He ate freeze-dried chicken tikka masala and the occasional raw tiny flying fish that landed on his deck. Through the ocean. He spent 40 unplanned days and nights wrestling with unfavorable winds and currents that sent him paddling in circles around the notorious Bermuda Triangle. All rights reserved, Aleskander Doba is our 2015 People's Choice Adventurer of the Year. The Polish . (This did work, in that Doba managed to drill the holes, but he couldnt steer.) He was still close to the New Jersey shore, so he landed at Barnegat Bay, ate a steak, slept at a hotel and continued on his way. At the start of that trip, she weighed 700 kilograms, and she carried (among other things) two carbon-fiber paddles, five spray skirts to cover Dobas body while he paddled, two pairs of kayaking gloves, three pairs of sunglasses, two pairs of reading glasses, 10 boxes of waterproof matches, two big butchers knives, one electric desalinator, two manual desalinators, three floating smoke signals, nine red flares, a cooking stove and propane canisters, two flashlights, two headlamps, an iPad, a GoPro camera, 320 lithium batteries (for Olos satellite signaling devices), mineral supplements, a sewing kit, 175 chocolate bars, three toothbrushes, seven bottles of sunscreen, three liters of homemade wine, a pumice stone for the calluses on his hands, two pairs of sandals and an emergency fishing kit. Those were very, very hard times for both of us. Shoot, the devil says. On the island, after 143 days at sea, Doba could hardly walk, and by the time he was ready to return to the Atlantic, it was late March, and the weather was turning bad. 70-year old Polish long-distance kayaker Aleksander Doba has embarked on a third attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a kayak, departing New York City for Portugal, on a three-month long, 3000 .

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